None of us are strangers to Adobe products. Photoshop has been the industry standard for so long it’s hard to remember when that was not the case, and, since the company swooped down and bought out Macromedia, they have little competition in the web content market. Now Adobe is trying to step into the game development market in a big way, and that may spell good news for projection and media designers everywhere.
Adobe (nee Macromedia) Director has been a sometime favorite of interactive designers, but was outpaced for a time by applications that could create richer, more flexible applications. Adobe has remedied this in the upcoming Director 11 by adding multi-user interactivity and an enhanced script browser that virtually removes the need to know how to program. The new version also has native support for more than 40 video and image formats.
Great news for game developers, but what does this mean for us? The ability to create content and playback engine in the same application. Often I run up against issues where both the cue-based and timeline-based playback systems that are available are missing features that would enhance certain shows.
With Director 11, when the situation calls for it, we will be able to create show-based playback user interfaces, giving the operators exactly the functionality that they need without extraneous features. Load your media, design your UI, then package the show as an application that runs independently of other software. Director-based applications can even launch and control (or be controlled by) other applications, including over a network.
In pre-order now, the new Director 11 shows a lot of promise. Can Adobe deliver a product that finally injects interactivity and control into the easy workflow of their other products?