Although Director 11 won’t be out until later this year, Adobe has shown the new icon on the Icon Color Wheel. Some people really liked the new icons, and others weren’t so happy. Luckily, there are many creative people out there, so new icon sets for Adobe CS3 apps have appeared on the web. A few of the sets have stayed ahead of the game and included Director icons. Click on them to see where they came from.
I can’t wait to see the real thing later this year!
May 15th, 2007
I rarely need to record what I see and hear on the screen, but every now and then a reason pops up. I’d used some others in the past, but on my MacIntel I was looking for a Universal program. I stumbled on to iShowU.
iShowU allows you to capture and record anything you can see on your screen, along with audio from a compatible source (like a microphone) as well as any audio from the mac itself.
I recorded my actions while playing Food Force on my 2.16 GHz Intel iMac for more than 30 minutes. If you download Food Force (it was made with Director, so was running in Rosetta-mode) you’ll see that it included a wealth of video, audio, and game play. iShowU had no problem keeping up with it all, and it left a lovely 3 Gig movie sitting on my desktop. Even on my older 1.42 GHz PPC iBook the recording was smooth (although my fan got cranked up a bit).
For just $20 it is hard to beat the price.
May 2nd, 2007
I enjoyed my time at the conference two weeks ago in Boston. I managed to catch a Red Sox game while there, meet up with a few Director folks, and drink a bit of beer.
Most of the sessions I went to were associated with gaming in education. The phrase of the day in eLearning is Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS). They are pretty much what they sound like. Immersive. Learning. Simulation.
A common form of immersion is taking place in massively multiplayer online games. Director is a tool that can be used to create these. Sites created with Director such as Habbo Hotel and MaidMarian were shown. Phosphor was also shown as an example of an amazing 1st person shooter for the web. Many people pointed out that Director really is the best tool for developing 3d web-based worlds.
During several sessions the speakers pointed out that the next version of Director will be coming out later this year. I was hoping the Adobe booth would have CS3 kicking around, but alas, even they didn’t get a copy to play with. While talking about Director I noticed a few people were also asking about an update to Authorware.
It was an interesting experience for me, since I’d never really thought much about the resources involved with the corporate side of eLearning (since I’ve always been on the K to college world). A lot of companies, and a lot of money. A bit shocking compared to the K-12 side of things.
The highlight of the conference though was probably due to Media 1. Their raffle prize was flying toy helicopter. Needless to say, the cute little helicopter now zips through the office near the end of the day. No critical data has been lost 🙂
April 25th, 2007
A new version of the Shockwave plug-in (for Windows) was released earlier today (now up to version 10.2.0.021). If anyone knows what is updated, please leave a comment. As was announced at the eLearning conference, it is supposed to add support for Vista.
Download page for Shockwave Players
Is MacIntel next? I hope so.
Update: Discussion on mailing lists indicates that this update made the following changes.
- Vista support for DirectX 7 rendering of 3D members.
- Removed registration form from install process.
- Removed need to restart browser after install.
All are nice new features. The last one is really nice.
April 23rd, 2007
For the second straight year ExploreLearning won the Codie for the Best Science Instruction Solution.
All the ‘Gizmos’ on our site are created with Adobe Director. Go Gizmos. Go Director.
April 18th, 2007
I talked about using Director in a session at the eLearning Guild 2007 Conference last week and it was announced (by Rick Jones from Adobe) that there will be an update for Vista later this month in the Shockwave Plug-in. Several sessions talked about using Director for Immersive Learning Simulations (ILS), particularly for the multiuser web-based content.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a MacIntel version will show up before the school year starts. At least a beta version over on Adobe Labs.
A few more thoughts from the conference later this week.
April 17th, 2007
Every now and then (ok…twice in the past three years) I’ve had a bug that ONLY shows up in Shockwave and not in authoring or projector mode. These are the most frustrating, since it is a bit harder to debug things. One of the toughest parts is that when an error pops up, this is what it looks like.
Not very useful.
Is there a way to get more information? Yes, but finding the answer has gotten harder. One answer is the shockwave.ini file (there are other debug methods for shockwave, but nothing here today). If you do a search for this you will find a bit about this on the web. Most items refer to Windows and not OSX. If you dig around on the Adobe site you will find this technote that discusses making changes to the director.ini file for debugging a projector. It then says you can do this with Shockwave, but trying to find out where to put that file seems to be missing from the Adobe site (even a search for shockwave.ini does not seem to provide an answer, although more can be found out about the Director.ini file).
Are you starting to wonder where this file should go? Lets get started. Go to this location on your computer (note: This is not in your user folder, it is the top level library folder):
/Library/Application Support/Macromedia/Shockwave 10/
You will then see a file called a Shockwave.bundle. Control-click on that bundle and select “Show Package Contents” from the list of options.
You will then be inside the Contents folder. Inside that is a folder called MacOS. That is where the shockave.ini* file will need to sit with the line DisplayFullLingoErrorText=1 placed in it.
You will then get errors when running in Shockwave that are a bit easier to deal with. Guess I was missing a handler that would help me find an answer (ugh..such a bad joke..it even hurts me).
When the next version of Shockwave gets released I have a feeling it will no longer go in a Macromedia folder, so I guess I’ll have to dig around to find yet another place to put my shockwave.ini file.
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*It is best to make a copy of the director.ini file and rename it shockwave.ini (for Director 10). The director.ini file is located in the Director/Configuration folder (typically /Applications/Macromedia Director/Configuration/director.ini). You can find more info about that file in Adobe Technote 3108.
April 1st, 2007
This week the Game Developers Conference is going on in San Francisco. If you are there you should drop by booth number 857 WH to chat with some Director folks and talk about the product announcement. Hanford Lemoore will also be at the GDC, and will be taking part in a session on March 8 (Thursday). Don’t miss it!
Next month the e-Learning Guild will be holding their 2007 Annual Gathering. Adobe will also be at that one to talk about Director. I’ll be there to chat about ExploreLearning does with Director. Stay tuned for more info on the session. I think my voice already got recorded and put up there. I haven’t been brave enough to listen. Phones and me…not always the best situation. I’d much rather be in front of a class, or digging through some Lingo 🙂
March 5th, 2007
Developers continue to wait for a MacIntel-compatible version of the Shockwave Plug-in and Director. Adobe has stated that they are working on this issue. The Intel-Macs were introduced more than a year ago (Jan 10, 2006) and I continue to look at stats to see what percentage of users are running MacIntels (I use Google Analytics for stats).
January was the first month where the percentage of hits on this site from MacIntels beat up on the old school PPCs. 55% of the Mac hits on this site were MacIntels. It is clear that the number of MacIntels is rapidly rising in the development sector, and I was rather surprised that the number has gone up as quickly as it has.
On some other sites I’m associated with the percentage of Macs that are Intel-based varies from 1% to 10%. In my office 50% of our Macs are now Intel-based (at least those that are in use…we never want to throw a Mac away…like my PowerBook 1400).
I’m still patiently waiting for the Universal Binary version of the plug-in. Please. Pretty please.
February 12th, 2007
The new Adobe icons have left a few people feeling a on the periodic table side of life, so one group has decided to run a contest to design a new set of icons for the Adobe Creative Suite.
Maybe one of us Director-centrists could create a new icon and we’ll just throw Director in the Creative Suite Bundle from now on. 🙂
January 31st, 2007
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