Vote No on the Mac Tax

Well, this is probably the end of the line, at least for now. As of this morning, and barring a rather large reversal by Macromedia in the near future, I will no longer look to Director as my primary interactive authoring application of choice. This is indeed a sad day for me, as I recently just marked my tenth anniversary working with Director. Why have I been forced to take such a drastic step? Why am I cutting my losses and looking elsewhere? Because, sadly, I can no longer afford to pony up and pay the Director Mac tax.

By now, I'm sure you've probably read the various articles either on this site or myriad others about the announcement of Director MX, which, when it ships, will finally be available natively on Mac OS X. This is good. In said articles, you've probably also read about what Macromedia refers to as Director's "author once and deliver anywhere" advantages. This would also be good, if only it were true. I guess "Pay twice, author once, tweak once, then you can actually deliver anywhere" wasn't snappy enough. Because that's what you have to do; indeed, what you've always had to do, in order to author cross-platform Director projects: buy Director twice. Macromedia requires that you purchase both the Mac and the Windows versions of Director in order to create programs that run on either platform. That not only means the initial outlay of over two thousand dollars, but has also meant shelling out anywhere from $600 to $800 each time Director got upgraded.

Earlier last year, I really didn't have any problem justifying the upgrade from Director 8 to 8.5. Macromedia, in what looked like a reversal of its long-time pricing policy, offered the upgrade for $199. That meant for less than $400, I could get Macromedia's long-awaited Shockwave 3D technology as well as native RealMedia support in Director, and I could continue to publish my projects for a cross-platform audience. I still had to have two copies of Director, one for Mac and one for Windows, but at least I was being offered a substantial upgrade value (frankly, many more features than one would expect in a .5 version upgrade) for about half of what Macromedia traditionally charged for Director upgrades. Director MX, in my opinion, does not offer nearly the same upgrade value as the 8 to 8.5 rev did, and what's more, Macromedia has gone back to its historical pricing model for Director upgrades. Now, I've had the chance to work with a Director MX beta for several weeks now, and it does have some nice features. But for my money, Flash MX support, a real debugger, and a Carbonized application are not enough for me to justify the double-whammy upgrade price. And no, all the accessibility stuff that Macromedia is pushing here doesn't really apply to me at all.

As a "born-again" Mac user (meaning that I started my computer life as a Mac user, switched to Windows NT/2000 in the late 90's, then came back when OS X matured in late 2001) I have no illusions that most of the people who view any of my interactive projects will be doing so from a Windows machine, and it makes good business sense for me to invest dollars in a solution that offers Windows compatibility. Most of the time, the choice to target Windows playback is a development no-brainer, barring the rare times when you have specific knowledge that the playback environment dictates otherwise. This is where the so-called Director Mac tax comes in. If you're a Mac developer or your project has to run on Macs, you have to pay the Mac tax in the form of an entirely new copy of Director. Even when I was in the middle of my Windows "experiment," I always authored projects to run on both Macs and Windows. Why? Because many clients wanted it that way. If at all possible, they preferred that their projects run on whatever machine their users had. And with Director, once I learned a few of the cross-platform authoring tricks (like checking for QuickTime, changing the path delimiter, etc.), other than adding platform-specific versions of certain Xtras, I never had to worry about tweaking any platform-specific code in my DIR files. Cross-platform authoring just wasn't a big deal from a development perspective, at least for me, and clients and users were generally a lot happier with the end result. But I had to pay the Mac tax every time a new version of Director was released.

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk to Miriam Geller, Macromedia's Senior Product Manager for Director and Shockwave, and I specifically asked her about the upgrade policy. She mentioned that while there were no plans to offer any special bundling deals for cross-platform versions of Director at this time, that it was indeed an issue for some developers and that there were potentially two ways of dealing with it. One, on the engineering side, future versions of Director could export both Mac and Windows projectors from a single version (like Flash does; more on that later). The other solution is pricing, in that a cross-platform bundle could conceivably be offered. It seemed that she (or whomever makes those decisions), if they were to do anything about it, might have been favoring the second option. She specifically mentioned that many developers have to write platform-specific code during the authoring process, and having full versions of Director on both platforms was necessary to accomplish that. I happen to think that the engineering solution would make the most sense, but then again, I didn't write the software, and I am on my best days only a mid-level Lingo person.

What's most frustrating about the whole situation is that Macromedia doesn't have this issue with another of its flagship applications, Flash MX. Whether you buy a single copy of either the Mac or Windows version, Flash lets you publish your projects for web-based output, as well as native Mac and/or (instead of just "or," based on which platform you author from) Windows self-running projectors. That, to me, is true "author once and deliver anywhere" capability. And with add-ons like Wildform's outstanding Flix Pro that converts video to SWF files, the various third-party Windows-only FS Command libraries, and some knowledge of AppleScript on the Mac side, it's quite possible to do things in Flash that up until recently only Director could do, and do them for a cross-platform audience regardless of your authoring platform of choice. Even after buying some of these add-ons in addition to the full version of Flash, you're still a good few hundred dollars below Director's purchase price for even a single platform version.

Now, I'm not blind to the fact that Director, in some areas, just can't be matched. If you need interactive real-time 3d, native integration with other media types, virtually endless extensibility or some measure of interaction with a host user's system, there aren't many programs that can equal the functionality Director offers. But personally, I'm not hard-core enough of a developer that I can't hitch my wagon to another program for most of my interactive projects, and there are some excellent alternatives out there. Flash MX, iShell, and LiveStage Professional come immediately to mind, each offering out-of-the-box cross-platform playback and a price tag well below the full version of Director.

It's a different time, it's a different economy, and as an independent designer and developer, I'm just going to have to vote with my wallet and say no to the Director Mac tax this go-round. And while I'm not abandoning Director completely, if and when the time comes to do a new Director project I'll just be sticking with Director 8.5, and authoring it from my Windows test box. I'll just have to make sure it runs OK in Classic.

Filed under: Opinion on December 20th, 2002

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