Director Roadmap Survey
- Comments
Below are comments made by respondants, organised in the following categories:| Positive Director Value in Director Use Hopeful / Hopes Not hopeful / Unsure |
Positive Director
Director rules! ;) Give Director the attention to surpass Flash!
Director has been my main development tool for over 10 years. It is the best tool for what I do and nothing comes close to replacing it. I look forward to the advancement of the premiere development tool. Build it and they will come.
Director is for me an extraordinary tool which has still right now no competitors, but its lacks of support since many years have deserved it :( I hope Adobe will impress us (soon) with the next version, now they have a nice and well done survey to know what to do first ; )
I think director is not dead. It is the best tool for develop the educational software (offline and online) and casual games
We have often thought that we made a mistake by choosing Director to develop our software in because there were so much time spent on problem solving and workarounds to get things done that seem to be basic in other development tools (like having MIAW work like normal Windows/Mac applications) and user controls like dropdown boxes and tables. However when we finished our product and started working on a Mac version we were glad that we used Director.
I love Director and I have always used it even when people laughed at me because of it. In my spare time I actually create my own graphic design and video production software with Director. It may not be as good as C++ but I have fun making them and that’ what counts to me. Keep Director fun and easy to use. Lingo in many ways is easier then basic and that’s what people like about it. Lingo in terms of age is pretty darn old but yet it can still hold its own and even many times beat the pants off of AS3 and that says a lot about it.
I hope the data collected is put to good use! I do love Director, having used it exclusively for many years now. I still enjoy trying to squeeze what I can out of it in terms of performance and visuals (in 3D), and it has scaled well with the faster computers of recent times. The 3D engine, reasonable when it came out, still holds up fairly well (for browser-based games) but there's no denying it desperately needs significant updates soon to be able to keep up with the other newer technologies and prevent them gaining serious market share.
hope it helps... don't think there is any other product in the world that is so versitile as director... would be lost without it... don't give up on us...
About Director, the only thing I can say is this tool is a must for me. It cannot be replaced by Flash, although it's the best Flash wrapper. Director is the link between desktop, removable media (cd-rom, DVD) and web application. It could be used by novice and expert programmer. It is, in fact, imho, the most versatile development tool from Adobe because it can embed or be link to all of the others by its architecture. For example, you can embed Flash, you can talk to ColdFusion, it could access FMS, be linked with Encore for DVD, integrate or talk to Acrobat and so on. I think, if they didn’t do it, that Adobe should take time to look at the little gem they have in their hands.
Go 12! I've been in the interactive field for almost 2 decades and I haven't seen such a loyal group of users as Director's developers: that is too valuable to loose. Think ahead this is THE tool!
For the music applications we do with MIDI combined with other multimedia, Director has been indispensable (and pretty much untouchable--even by Flash).
I'm following some debates about AS3 and multimedia in general, where everyone seems to have forgotten Director, or at best it has a very bad reputation (falsely). I have a revived interest in Director, and Director is a BRILLIANT product which answers many of the needs of the modern multimedia developer. It just isn't contemporary - but its out-of-date-ness is only skin deep. I think this survey is a step in the right direction, in collecting some real data and not just 'thoughts' and ramblings.
I sometimes wonder if the Director Cast and Score Windows are the only reason I don't switch to something else. They're great organizational tools (that of course could be even better). Flash's Library and Score are crippled in comparison though I'm warming to ActionScript 3 (despite of the extra punctuation :-)
Value in Director Use
I have used Director continuously since 1991, for educational software developed with National Science Foundation support. It is the most powerful tool imaginable for my needs - if you can dream it up, you can do it in Director. It is astounding that Adobe doesn't recognize what they have in the product, and has allowed relationships with the Xtras developers to deteriorate to this point. Luckily, Director MX works fine with Vista so I will continue to use it until it is no longer functional. Nobody from Adobe has ever responded to my repeated attempts at communication. Very sad.
Director is necessary to our core business, it is the player environment for our kiosk/signage engine. We build around the outside of it with Flash, Flex, Java Servers, etc - We use Director as an authoring tool for the system as well (and CS3, and and and). We have a product that encourages the further sale of other Adobe products including Director.
Director is the only application that we develop desktop/cd-rom applications in.
I've just finished a project that has taken 8 years. Time now to start looking at some of the newer features of the programme!!!
A typical project will get developed in less than a month but my biggest project has been developed over several years and is often re-branded and updated/developed on.
Hopeful / Hopes
I personally hope Director continues to move forward. It had a rough few years with no development, and the current release was a bit of a disaster. At my workplace Flash is rapidly becoming the main tool, but for small projects and CD's I work on independently I'm sticking with Director since it really seems to allow faster development of completed multimedia. I hope Adobe takes things like this seriously.
i really hope Adobe wants to support Director
I am very glad for the revival of Director and I hope for a deeper upgrade for not loosing anymore the rythm of technology. And I am sorry for being too tired for answering more deeper to your very interesting and important survey. Thanks.
I really hope Director 12 will get the product back on track. I will gladly buy upgrades for a stable, useful upgrade and praise Director as a platform to others.
Well done on the effort Dean. I hope the Director team can pull something great out of the bag for D12 before too many more developers jump ship. I'm still evaluating alternatives for online 3D games, mainly Unity 3D, and the various Flash engines (alternative, papervision, away3d). If I have been forced to make the switch before D12 arrives, chances are I won't be looking back!
I really appreciate your efforts Dean, keep it up !! Director is still my favorite development tool, I'd really really like to see the 3D updated, and hope my upcoming games will make for some cool advertising for the shockwave player :)
I'm glad that Dean and others have made the effort to put this survey together - hopefully the effort will be reciprocated by Adobe. For many years I have built what I think are great things with Director - things that I am very proud of. Now I manage a crew of developers - working exclusively with Flash. The reasons for that shift are complicated but not surprising. Director is an amazing tool despite how it's been neglected by both Macromedia and Adobe. Flash got the focus and rich media went on the back-burner until bandwidth became ubiquitous. Now is a good time for Director - if it and Shockwave worked properly. I still build some things in Director because that's the best way to make them. If Adobe can fix Shockwave along with the debacle that is D11 then maybe there will be a lot more things that we can make. Here's hoping.
I REALLY hope Director survives and makes a strong comeback. Lingo makes sense to me and I find I am VERY productive with Director. It really is a powerful tool. And, despite some quirkiness (i.e. the build-up of temp files when embedded fonts are used, causing out of memory errors years after an initial installation), the apps I've written in Director are very stable and reliable. I would like to see support for other languages incorporated if for no other reason than to help Director regain some level of appreciation/consideration from the "Flash" crowd and others who have essentially written it off. Multi-touch is the next big wave, at least in my line of work. I would love to see Director as one of the first to incorporate native tools for this purpose. Very well thought out and detailed survey. Thanks for taking the time to put it together.
I am Director lover since many a year. Hope to see it evolve & reach version 20 and every other little authoring software burning in envy.
I hope that Director 12 kicks butt. I have a lot invested in Director projects and they will be lost to education if D12 fails.
My thoughts.... I hope in some small way this will help. What happened to the Adobe support team behind Director ? It has even greater potential now....now that machines off the shelf are doing heavier lifting and bandwidth is no longer an issue. I hope new Director books will be published. That was my initial draw into the program. Cheers.
It seems the Director 11 is not very active in the web community which may mean that it might be dying. This would be a real shame as I am not sure what program I would switch to for development. I have used it with success for many years and recently purchased the Director 11 for Mac after using it with Windows for the previous years. I hope that the outcome of this survey helps to produce a better and more competitive product that earns Director 12 its own place against Flash in the development community.
Great survey. These questions got my hopes up. I've gone away from Director because Flash/Flex/AIR make it easier to develop multimedia intensive applications. I never thought I would leave Director, but I did. At this point, I don't see myself leaving Flex. But if Director can make my life easy and give me features that Flex doesn't, I won't hesitate to come back.
Director is still a wonderful product to use, but what Adobe are doing is driving it downhill instead of up. If they can't handle the development of the product properly, they should leave it alone, or sell it to a more capable company. I don't want Director to die, but we can't keep using Director MX 2004 forever. Let's hope Director 12 is better than its predecessor.
My opinion is that Macromedia let a wonderful product die by making its priority a not-so-wonderful product (Flash). Clients lost interest in the things Director could offer them and now it's practically a dead area of activity. Hopefully, the rebirth of the tool will spark new business opportunities as clients become aware of the fact that there is life outside the Flash box.
i am glad there is still interest in Director, I moved off it begrudgingly, but will come back if it ever catches up to Flash AS3 or surpasses Unity
I was quite underwhelmed by Director 11... but understand reason for release. It shouldn't have come any later!! Hope it wasn't too late. Still my development platform of choice, but need to broaden my horizons to keep bread on the table, so investigating C++ and Objective-C as my next move. If Director can convince in its next incarnation, I'll be back as soon as I can. Hoping I don't have to trash 15 years of experience :-) This survey: Great initiative. Hope it helps.
I don't have a typical project, 2 weeks to 2 years would be the range. I LOVE Director, it from D3.11 to D8.5, it made work = fun. Since D9. it has been a trial (not because the work changed - the UI and quirks overwhelmed the positive parts of using the tool)...I have been sticking around in the hope that it would get fixed, and then I will jump back into development again in a heart beat...
Keep at it Adobe - you'll get it right eventually even if it is Trial and Error.
Not hopeful / Unsure
Thanks, but sadly we've been through all this before - I'm not holding out too much hope. We'll probably be switching tools soon.
Thanks for this survey. I lost faith in Director's development, so currently I feel, that even the time for this great survey is somehow lost. Since Adobe choose to ruin all and every of their software to increase margin, I doubt things will change (especially for Director).
Director has passed its zenith. There is too much work to be done in order to revamp it to the results passed on on this survey. Director is huge, and it is old. Although i advocate threads, i reckon it will never happen as the architecture of the software doesn´t server itself to it.
Director was always a fabulous product- while it might have had its quirks, it seemed that there was little it couldn't do- someone somewhere would have made an Xtra, or there was a solution for whatever was needed. However, debacles in the Shockwave rollout and branding, along with an ongoing lack of support for Xtra developers and general malaise in the product have seen a sad decline, and the better-supported and more actively developed Flash/Flex/AIR have eaten into much of its market. I'm still very fond of Director and believe it could be a vital product with a vibrant development community - it's still beloved by many - but I'm unsure if there's sufficient commitment at Adobe to make it highly relevant once again.
I've been trying to go through this survey, but am seriously doing battle with myself internally because it just feels so absolutely pointless. I truly feel that Adobe does not care what we have to say, and that it will make ZERO impact on them. Every question makes me say "man, it's too bad they'll never do that.”
Director is currently not used for active development in our shop. There is a reasonable chance that it will continue to play a supporting role, depending on the feature set of upcoming releases, and (for a large part) on external factors. However, there is no guarantee that Director WILL still be in use here in a year or so even if all or most of the features outlined in this survey would be implemented. It's not my personal decision to make.)
Director 11 Rants
I used to like Director before Director 11, now I am disgusted in the useless crap that was put into the product. Valuable developer time was pissed away making the product less worse than the previous version
Adobe's failure to invest more resources after the debacle that was Dir11 seems to be a signpost to the future. Alas, nothing else seems to offer what Director does for someone in my position where programming is an adjunct to teaching rather than a profession.
I converted my last project to Director 11 for the Mac support, but the experience of using it (on my PC) is so awful it looks like I'm going to stop using Director altogether in favor of Flash. This will cost our company a lot of money.
I have given up on D11, even when the hotfix 3 comes. I am currently focused on web based projects and may look at Director again when version 12 comes... I currently use DMX2004 for personal development and keeping in touch with the Director community.
I'm sorry I didn't add any additional comments in many of the fields; I don't have the luxury of taking 45 minutes out of a day to provide free information to a for-profit company that releases sub-standard products. I quit trying to use D11 when it became obvious (to me) that Adobe was soliciting advice and suggestions and ignoring all of it and following their own "plan" anyway. I only filled out the survey to support the efforts of Dean and others who have an interest in helping drive the discussion for the good of all. But I have no confidence that Adobe will honestly listen to and put any effort into accommodating their users. It's been almost a year since D11 first appeared and it's still in sorry shape. No professional developer takes such little pride in their work.)
Disappointments
We have almost dropped director from our development tools, our main use of director is that it gives us the edge in 3D for online and cdrom production. Most of our recent projects have used flash for 3d content, flash 10 is set to further enhance this area. Director just feels so out of date and clunky nowadays, dir11 was a real let down just added insult to injury
I'm beginning to hate Director, when I get used to using Flash sometimes, it makes me feel ill about how much more complicated, time-consuming and difficult Director development is compared to Flash. If flash had a decent system toolset then i wouldn't use Director.
Thanks! Sorry I wasn't able to be more elaborate in my answers, but I am a bit down on Director right now because it seems Adobe/Macromedia has virtually discontinued it.
If a host of major issues had been fixed in Director MX 2004 and then maybe the addition of full OS controls support (on all recent Mac and Windows platforms) and MovieClip functionality then Director 11+ would really be moving forward as far as I am concerned. I do very little 3D and so have not answered all those questions relevant to that. I am very depressed about the future of Director and for the first time, this year 2008, I have made a serious commitment to moving to AS3 with Flash and AIR etc. Adobe has relegated Director to a second-rate app with mediocre software development support. It is a testament to the beauty and power of Director that I can still use MX 2004 as a powerful tool that almost matches Flash in 2008 (we'll see about Flash 10). In fact I can still do things in Director that are not possible and probably will never be possible in Flash such as using the amazing QuickTime Movie Xtra by Stephan Eichhorn which allows me to create QuickTime movies on the fly in lingo. This is an essential part of my shareware app cuePics, a slide-show program written entirely in Director with a selection of Xtras www.cuePicsSoftware.com)
Director is Dead / Dying
I made a living by using director. I think it is now dead as a wide spread program. At the point that flash came into being, Director should have concentrated on using director to implement the things that flash now does and less concentration on 3d. Flash is headed in this direction - it will be dead to a large group of people if the ability to program becomes more complex rather than easier. Needs full internet integration vs. mobile.
Great survey. Hope it helps. Greatly disappointed with the way Director has been dropped by Adobe. Was always (18 years) my primary tool. Feel that it is now dead (or dying)
Great initiative. Unfortunately, I suspect many users will have trouble finding the time to properly fill it out -- I had to "steal" time at work to do so. With the recent performance increases on the Flash platform, and some of the very interesting developments in the .NET/Mono space (Silverlight/Unity), Director is looking like it's finally dead. At the moment, I would be happy with Lingo syntax being added to Flash, or Mono. Sad, indeed, but there it is.
When comparing how Director 11 turned out to the upcoming features of Flash "CS4", I can't help but thinking that Director is dead. All it takes for Flash to completely take over, is support for "xtras" and improved performance. Which is kinda sad, because I have been using Director for so long and can create everything I dream of with it. Even though it still gives me headaches sometimes.
My company was built and based on Director. It is what made programming an enjoyable vocation for many years. That Director does not exist any more. That Director is dead, or even worse, a corporate zombie which only exists to bilk payload dollars from unwitting victims, and nothing you or I have to say about it will make the slightest difference. Good luck with your postmortem survey. I hope it makes for good personal reading, because I honestly believe the cause is already lost.
It's still a great tool but development seems to have almost ceased
I will miss Director...)
Pleas
Please bring up to date. Director is for offline/interactive-3d content what Flash is for the web. Expand Adobes product-suite to include the overwhelming strengths of what is a fantastic development subset.
Keep Director alive, it is a great tool, and has no viable alternative yet.
Is still the king of multimedia, and very viable. Just needs the attention it deserves, so is not overshadowed by newer but lesser technologies, and the ability to deploy everywhere - get the plugin standard as per Flash, and target mobile devices. And please make sure that Mac and Windows versions are given the same considerations - neither should be the "poor cousin" of the other.
Don't let director die! Adobe: listen to the community, your CUSTOMERS!
Adobe - Please update Director's 3D engine soon. If Unity had a PC editor I would have swapped already. I rather not have to re-train though!...
fix the bugs, show us a roadmap like flash does
I wish director would not disapear and mostly that adobe develops more partnerships to make shockwave as simple as flash to use for the common websurfers
We need visible commitment form Adobe to prove their interest in Director. Otherwise this application has no future any more.
Please market Director more aggressively. It's one of your most flexible and expensive products with a diehard loyal userbase (who are waiting for Adobe to "save" Director and make it king again).. yet it seems pushed aside on the website, and all its good features are being slowly taken (and improved) by Flash. Improving the 3D engine and 3D gaming side would help give Director an edge against Flash and other products like DarkBasic Pro and Torque.
Adobe need to pull their finger out and make some upgrades to a great piece of software that has been ignored for too long.
The Adobe Director team really need to pull their ( finger / head - select as appropriate ) out, and communicate with the public regards the Director roadmap. If a Dir12 roadmap exists, why can this ( or a sparse overview of it ) not be released now, or months ago? Seeing experienced Director developers jump ship to other technologies ( eg Unity 3D ) is very disheartening, and knowing that a roadmap exists but isn't shared is also very frustrating ( eg Allen visiting potential new clients worldwide, I'm assuming sharing this information, but the Director Team seemingly ignore existing developers )
High quality survey, I hope it helps! Director must become a modern, up to date authoring environment again, otherwise it will die a slow and painful death.
One big wish: Open communication by adobe to the director developers
Adobe should give Director more coverage...
In order for Director to even compete as a product any more it needs a lot of attention. If the suggested features for version 12 in the survey are actually going ahead, and soon, then this is a great start.
Having tried out D11, I just want a version of Director that will work properly.
Good attempt to gather data and I truly hope that Adobe will invest more money and resources in the next version of Director. However, I truly believe that their business model is wrong. It is wrong to market director as a 3D content creation tool because it is not. Director has always been good in desktop related projects and it should stay like this.
I'm completely dependent on Director (and I don't want to change that!!!) and for me it is essential that the text engine is fixed in every aspect and that there is support for any operating system on the PC market. I need a development platform reliable on every OS (I'm a crossplatform developer). Up-to-date flash support is essential (including FLV), native UI components would be good. Thanks for developing this survey and sorry for my English.
i want 3d new features, what is director 12 release date? thank you dean.
Suggestions / Advice
Give copies away to every legitimate educational outlet. The only way to increase the install base is to expose it to new users, and the best way to do that is through institutional learning. I taught Director at a local college for years until they dropped it from the schedule in 2003. They dropped it for budgetary reasons, they could supply two labs with the latest version of Flash for less money than one lab with Director.
Director is a really good tool. It’s fallen behind in a lot of areas and in others it’s been in the future for a long time. Balance the two, reduce the price for authoring and more people will get into it.
Director is so much more intuitive to learn than Flash and basic tweening features so much quicker to achieve. Transitions are clunky and desperately need the aqua and transparency magic wand!
Just to stress the 2 main things that have hindered the development of the projects I work on - speed and ease of development. To have a better workflow and integration with creative suite will speed up development, but do not actually hinder the development of a project.
Strategy for the Shockwave platform: 1. Remove the adware / bulkware that comes with the Shockwave player - this a huge concern for me as a developer as I'm in a process of talking to a client about it 2. Create an ShockStore and charge 30% for games sold via the ShockStore (see Steve Jobs & Co for more reference). It helps indie devs reach out and is much better way for Adobe to build the Shockwave platform and Adobe brand and image (compared to the sneak-in apps model of today!). Please!
Faster Development - if you are too lame, hijack some faster way to bring improvements. Pay the best. Dive into the core and plugin .net and java. more multithreaded xtra support. Something better than As3 hype style. Adapt more c code. Be the 3d-Kiosk tool for Windows and be untouchable- in that cat. e-learning and Architecture!
First: This survey is a really good initiative. Choosing between Flash or Director is a struggle every time I have to develop a product. Director at my company is mostly used as a wrapper around flash nowadays, but I experience the workflows and syntax of the two are too far apart. If the goal of Director is 'Director AND Flash', the lingo syntax has to be updated radically (and because.. well, the syntax does make some of my collegues giggle).
Since Director is used primarily for games here, all of my examples (had I filled them in) of 'usage' would have been game projects. The tagline for Dir11 was 'Make games better'. Unless there are more game-centric features in place, this isn't even a remote possibility.
Even if i'm on a "small one man team", better support for professional level tools is a must, otherwise i may even consider to change dev platform. I need to integrate all the nice tools available just by adding subversion for instance and automate all tasks related to publishing the projects.
An update would be great, to ease production of games and complex websites.
adobe's one side flash/flex policy created the self made bad director image; there could be a niche for director in hosting flash/flex in a more hardware OS extended way then AIR (compare Authorware's hosting of director/flash files)
Director for play-station and X-Box is very important)
Thanks for the Survey
Director is agonising. Thank you for this survey
Great to do a survey like this, is Adobe going to use it?
It's a very good idea! I hope the indian dir-team will be able to hear our aspirations, hopes and dreams! Thanks, Dean!!!
Well put together survey. Hope Adobe listens! :)
You've invested quite some work. Hope that it get's some notice and oh i liked the green colour.
This survey is huge!
I did not provide any real world examples. I just didn't have time and I wanted to make sure I completed this survey. Thanks for your efforts, Dean!
Thank you for letting us have our say. I found your request for real world examples of features that Director does not yet have confusing (excuse me if I just missed something obvious). Did you want actual URLs?
Thanks for you efforts. I was a Director User Group manager. I ran a couple of Breeze/Connect meetings that I advertised on the Direct-L. I'm glad to see that succeeding.
great survey, if you need more detail just let me know
Dean you did a great job! It's important that people keep using Director
Very well done survey! Very good points raised and options chosen!
Thanks
Very comprehensive survey! Really good work. Effectively, i should have read the pdf before because the questions are quite exhaustive.
too long :)
The survey was big and daunting.