Long-time Director users have been wondering where the product has been heading even before Macromedia was swallowed up by Adobe, so who better than Adobe's Product Manager for Director and the Shockwave Player himself, Tom Higgins, to bring us up-to-date on the latest goings-on in the world of Director? The bottom line seems to be that the Director faithful can breathe a little easier, as Adobe appears not to have forgotten about you.

As my regular readers (who most assuredly now number in at least the high single digits) know, I'm a big Flash guy, at least from a designer's point of view (those programmer folks are nuts with their Eclipses and Flexes and what have you). I'm also a somewhat big After Effects guy, so naturally I'm curious about how the two products will influence each other now that they're both living under the Adobe roof. I'm also curious about where Flash is going in general, so I was quite pleased to be able to pose a few questions recently to Mike Downey, Adobe's Senior Product manager for Flash. And while the responses are about as tight-lipped as one might expect considering that we're discussing a product in the middle of its development cycle, there are nonetheless some tantalizing nuggets about where things may be heading over there in Flash-land.