Sugestions for Director 12

Question

(hope someone in Adobe reads that)
Before its too late
1 Make life easier for tlash users who want to make some 3d,
add to Director only ONE more languages:
ActionScript2 ( AS3 sux )
2 game lybraries game lybraries game lybraries
3 a better IDE, dont even have to create a new one, copy the
flex one
4 help files with WORKING EXAMPLES
Adobe please never forget your market is NOT the old Director
users but the flash users that want to make some 3d but would
rather user papervision(bleargh) tham Director

Answer 1

I came across an interesting article by Colin Moock (good
Actionscript book author) regarding the controversy around AS2 vs
AS3; one and a half year after its release AS3 is still
controversial and not widely accepted among Flash developers. Moock
does some fine myth busting (by comparing AS1/AS2 vs AS3 line by
line showing that it isn't that different), and while he himself is
definetly an AS3 'fan', he also puts Adobe on the trial: has Adobe
killed multimedia??!!! Then he does a division which is what I
think is relevant in this discussion about Director as well: there
is the TOOL and there is the LANGUAGE. While AS3 is an enormous
improvement over AS2 is in its consequence and strict logic, this
is mostly to the benefit of engineers; not designers. While it is
fine that for instance ‘buttons’ now is an object like
any other, this/it requires a level of abstraction that is
irrelevant for the designer. Irellevant, irritating, disturbing;
hence counter productive. It is not that designers are stupid, but
this is not what they should use their intellectual resources for
anyway. Even if conceptually brilliant, you should not need to
write five lines of code for simple navigation. The solution
(inspired by Moocks article) is not to reintroduce or cling to old
ways, but to make things like simple naviagtion available in the
TOOL. This division makes sense to me, and I hope it will be
possible to keep these things separate when we discuss the future
of Director as well. Generally Director has been better off than
Flash. Originally our app had plenty of ‘visual
programming’, for instance pauses and transitions directly in
the Score, but this has been downplayed and not improved upon. In
Flash you can’t access individual Layers, while in Director
the Sprite is of course identical to the channel/layer, and
it’s a good thing. We also have had drag & drop
behaviours for simple navigation and such stuff for quite a long
time, but again: this needs to be done even better, so that it is
obvious that this is the right way and the best way. Do not open a
script window – for c&#% sake – for a simple
‘go to’!
Whether Lingo needs imporvement, or be exchanged with
something else, is another debate. I like Lingo, and for me it has
offered a fine gradual transition into more complex programming.
Whether Lingo offers ‘real’ or ‘fake’ OOP
is a moot point for +90% users; you don’t use any of that
anyway when you make a portifolio disk for a client.
As Moock also states, designing a good ‘tool’ is
not an easy task. From what I’ve read about the development
team in India, they seem to lack a deep understanding of what
Director is and needs to be. I don’t blame them, but if
they’re left alone in their development without interplay
from a strong reference group of actual users, I’m not too
optimisitic on Director’s future. Adobe seems to have killed
multimedia – for the time being – by letting Director
drift away, and while Flash is gaining popularity and kudos among
Java developers et al for AS3, the disperancy between that and the
visual environment most people actually is working in is becoming
larger; from a crack to a shaft. It's amazing that they're letting
this happen.