Macromedia Flash (May 2002, page 60), Dreamweaver, Fireworks and FreeHand (Studio MX, November 2002, page 71), have all been given the MX treatment, and now it's Director's turn.
The first feature that unites the MX applications is the interface. In the past, Director relied on a host of differently shaped and sized floating palettes. These are now consistent panels, most of which are conveniently docked to the side of the screen. By default, Director's central document window, the Stage, remains floating, while both the Cast panel – containing all project elements – and the Score – where the project timeline is controlled – are docked to the bottom of the screen. The main Property Inspector panel runs down the right.
Occasionally used palettes, such as the Behaviour, Text and Memory Inspectors, and the Align and Library windows, have been turned into the tabs of a new Utilities panel group, positioned by default under the main Property Inspector. Even more sensible is the decision to incorporate the previous Control palette – used for playing and stepping through your project – into a button bar at the bottom of the Stage.
The new interface is a big overhaul, but it's a pity it didn't go further. The problem is more fundamental than the lack of modern staples like multiple undo and the ability to open multiple projects. The whole stage, cast and score metaphor is an underpowered hangover from Director's earlier days and it doesn't fit with the rest of the MX stable. Director's MX makeover
feels cosmetic.
Director MX's most obvious edge, compared with Flash MX's vector bias and Fireworks MX's bitmap bias, is that it's always been designed to handle as wide a range of media as possible.
In the past, you could create and edit these media through another set of separate floating windows. Now they've all been joined together as tabs on a new Edit panel group.
It's cosmetic, but it makes a big psychological difference as you instantly feel in control of all your project's elements.
What makes Director unique in the MX collection is its support for the two most advanced multimedia elements: long-format video and 3D. The Edit panel has separate tabs for dealing with RealMedia (both audio and video), and the latter has been enhanced to cover QuickTime 6's streaming MPEG-4 capabilities.
Even more impressive is Director's support for Shockwave 3D, which enables the creation of everything from interactive 3D presentations to stunning games.
Unfortunately Director's 3D capabilities have been left virtually untouched with the focus now on bitmap and vector basics. Director MX supports a wide range of formats, including BMP, GIF and JPEG. These can be edited in the Paint tab of the Edit panel, but the power on offer is just embarrassing.
My advice is to edit your bitmaps with Fireworks MX.
Director also supports Fireworks MX's PNG file natively, allowing you to import files directly into the current Cast without exporting them first. For more advanced work, including image tables and scripting, Director MX includes an Xtra package for easing the cross-application workflow. Bizarrely, though, Fireworks is no longer bundled with Director, and SoundEdit has also been dropped.
Rather than bitmaps and Fireworks, Director MX's new focus is on vectors with its support for the latest Flash MX files. The integration isn't as tight as Fireworks, as you can't import Flash's native FLA format files, but you can import Flash's exported SWF files. More importantly, when you double click on a Flash MX Cast member, Director MX automatically opens the associated FLA file. Once you've made your changes, the new SWF is exported from Flash and re-imported into your project. For existing Flash MX users, this opens up a lot of power.
Apart from its support for so many different media, Director's success comes from how it handles these different elements and brings them to life. The easiest way to achieve this is through dragging and dropping from the range of pre-supplied behaviours from the Utilities/Library tab. To take absolute control you need to write your own scripts in Director's dedicated programming language Lingo.
All Lingo work is handled in the floating Script window, which can be tidily grouped with the other Edit panels. This offers a number of new buttons for controlling auto colouring, auto formatting and line numbering, as well as lists of Lingo's 3D commands.
The biggest improvement lies in the incorporation of the previously separate Debug window – the Script window now switches to debugging mode when a breakpoint is encountered. Thanks to the new Object Inspector tab on the Utilities panel, you can also speed up debugging by viewing and editing all the properties of your script instances, as well as the elements within your 3D and Flash MX content.
These changes are all welcome, but compared with the scripting environments in Flash MX and Dreamweaver MX – with their integrated reference and example-based help – programming in Director MX simply appears old-fashioned and under-supported.
Expectations for Director MX were high after version 8.5 introduced over 300 3D Lingo commands, but MX is much more limited.
There are new commands for controlling QuickTime sprites, but the main push in this version is to open access to the properties and methods of imported Flash MX objects.
Potentially the most exciting capability here is being able to create new Flash MX objects from within Lingo code and gain access to the MX platform's server-side capabilities.
Working in conjunction with Flash Communication Server MX (a personal edition for development work is bundled), this gains you access to end users' Webcams and microphones for multi-user communication.
What's more, it opens up direct access to server-side data and Web services with Flash Remoting MX or ColdFusion MX. It's exciting, but this capability is notably piggybacked through Flash MX and ActionScript, and not native to Director and Lingo.
There's one area, however, where Director MX introduces significant new power, and that's accessibility. The first addition is designed to set up ways of interacting with an application other than with a mouse, and the second is designed to help the visually impaired by reading out text associated with a sprite when tabbed to or clicked on.
More advanced behaviours include the ability to hear each letter as it's typed and synchronise speech with on-screen captions.
Director MX applications are compatible with existing 8.51 Shockwave players, which according to Macromedia means that Director MX content is immediately accessible to 63 per cent of the Web audience, and over three hundred million users, but it doesn't have Flash's 98 per cent penetration. And this is Director's main problem.
Flash MX is so powerful with its own advanced programming language, multimedia capabilities and integration with server-side technologies that it's pretty much all you need for most design-intensive Web work.
Director still offers many strengths over Flash: long-format video, 3D handling, extensibility, advanced memory management and now text-to-speech – and the majority of Director work continues to be delivered via CD and DVD. However, Director stands out from the competition with Shockwave's web-based delivery of rich content, but this is now under serious threat from Macromedia's own Flash MX. Moreover, judging by the latest releases of each, it's clear where Macromedia's main development interest currently lies.
By grafting on Flash MX support and integrating into the M