Adobe Director 11

In the spirit of the four year hiatus between versions (and accompanying uncertainty as to the dead/not dead status of the product), it's only fitting I let almost a year roll by between the announcement/release of Director 11 and finally getting around to reviewing it. In any event, Director is back from its long slumber, so let's take a look at what the eleventh release of the former king of the multimedia hill brings to the table.

Unsolicited Perspective

Not too long ago, I had a thoroughly enjoyable conversation with Allen Partridge, Adobe's Director Evangelist. (In the shameless plug department, that interview is available by clicking this link.) If you know anything about Director, then you are already familiar with how completely it dominated the multimedia landscape in the 1990s, and Allen was on the scene for a good chunk of that time. However, as the world shifted away from physical media and onto the Web, the meteoric rise of Flash has coincided with the decline of Director. Sure, the Shockwave browser plug-in for Director is at about a 60% penetration rate, which is pretty good, but you can certainly get around online without needing it. Meanwhile, try getting along without Flash, especially if you want to watch Web video. But I digress. For a long time, it wasn't clear if there would ever be a new release of Director, and while the Director developer community is still quite viable, I suspect the world of online multimedia would have moved along just fine without ever seeing another release of Director.

But here we are with Director 11. During my conversation with Dr. Partridge, he told me that Director is really being positioned where there are significant differences between it and Flash, namely real-time 3D, extensibility in the form of Xtras, and, to a lesser extent, those with a need for protected code. It was also mentioned that Director is in an active development mode, with an eye towards putting Director back into a leadership position in the multimedia industry. However, after taking a detailed look at Director 11, and coupled with the deafening silence out of Adobe as to when updates and enhancements will be coming (even in this era of public betas and prolific blogging at Adobe), I have a hard time seeing how exactly Director's return to glory is going to happen. While I love Director and have a soft spot in my heart for the product, what's clear to me after seeing Director 11 in action is that its heyday is long past. We'll talk more about what specifically is going on in just a bit.

In any event, it makes me feel a little better knowing that someone with the multimedia chops and a passion for Director like Allen Partridge is the one spreading the word these days, but Director has a tough row to hoe even to stay relevant, much less regain any semblance of its once-dominant leadership position. I wish him luck. He's got his work cut out for him.

One more thing before I get to the roundup of what's new: Director 11 shipped in March of 2008, meaning that a full ten months have passed (as of this writing) between the product's release and this review. I'll spin the delay thusly: the passage of time in this case gives us some added perspective and allows us to see how Director fits into the fairly-freshly-released CS4 landscape, in addition to giving us the ability to look back and see what has happened in the months since the product shipped.

New and Notable

It really saddens me that there isn't more to talk about in terms of new features. The best way to characterize Director 11 is as a maintenance release; a shoring up of the foundation so that future enhancements can be made. At least I hope that is the case. For the most part, however, Director 11 is a collection of tweaks punctuated by a scant few noticeable enhancements. Let's go around the horn:

Interface. While Director's overall interface is a holdover from the bygone Macromedia era, there are a some tiny tweaks. The most noticeable addition is the ability to dock the Stage and the Score together (fig. 1), which is a small but nice change. Another notable enhancement is how the Script panel can appear as a tab in the main Score and Stage window, a welcome development for those of us who quickly ran out of workspace in previous versions.

Figure 1

There's also the ability to float or unfloat tool windows, a feature which will prove useful to those with multiple monitors or want to be able to see tool windows in the background when Director isn't active.

However, none of these tweaks can be considered huge changes to Director's interface by any stretch of the imagination, which I think is really unfortunate. Once you've seen the very much improved CS4 Design interface (as featured in programs such as Photoshop and Flash), the old-school Macromedia interface still sported by Director looks positively ancient by comparison. I'm thinking specifically of Fireworks CS4 as an example of what an interface refresh does to the usability of a legacy program, and I'm inclined to believe that Director 11 would have greatly benefited from similar treatment. I realize such a crossover may not have been feasible considering the respective development cycles for Director 11 and the CS4 lineup, but I would have taken even a CS3-like refresh, which did wonders for Flash CS3 Professional.

Text. Director's beleaguered text engine gets a little less so with this latest version, most notably through the addition of Unicode text support throughout the program. For example, if I have a Cast Member that I wish to name "Where is the nearest restaurant" in Chinese, I can now do so (Fig. 2).

Figure 2

Also, Director now boasts what Adobe calls improved font shaping and rendering through the addition of the Bitstream font engine, though in pulling up older projects in Director 11 I couldn't see any noticeable difference. Your mileage may vary.

Filters. A long time in coming, Director 11 now sports many of the same filters Flash users have enjoyed since version 8. Live effects such as glows and drop shadows can finally now be added on the Stage inside Director itself (fig. 3), rather than having to be pre-rendered in an external program. If I may turn this section into "Quick Tip Corner" for a moment, if you apply a filter to a text field, make sure to set the inking to Background Transparent in the Sprite properties, or else the filter will be applied to the field's bounding box.

Figure 3

Scripting. While still in need of a ground-up rewrite, Director 11's Script Window is nonetheless a marked improvement over its predecessors. In addition to the ability to dock the Script Window to the main window, the Script Window itself now boasts a sidebar which contains a script dictionary as well as a script browser (fig. 4). The latter feature is especially helpful, displaying just the scripts strewn about your movie without having to leave the environment and go hunting through the Cast Window.

Figure 4

3D. Look, I'm probably the last person in the Director community who could intelligently evaluate what's going on with 3D in Director, a fact which, for some, may nullify anything else I say in this piece. Fair enough. My personal ignorance on this subject notwithstanding, Director's 3D capabilities certainly appear to be robust, and indeed, it's one of the major differentiators Adobe cites when talking about Director. However, I have no flippin' idea how to use it. Other than rudimentary shapes and extruded text and the like, I've always found that for someone coming from a design background, the more advanced 3D features are nigh unapproachable in Director, which is ironic considering Director's legacy as the program that made multimedia approachable for the masses in the first place. With that said, it's nonetheless apparent to me that 3D is the one area that has received a great deal of care and feeding in this latest version, and considering Director's presence in immersive learning and MMOs, this makes a lot of sense. So new features like DirectX 9 support and the inclusion of the AGEIA PhysX engine, coupled with various fixes and tweaks such as the Save 3D World command, should help the cause. Knowing my severe limitations here, let's move on.

Publishing. While the publishing process is largely unchanged from prior versions, there are a couple items of note. For starters, Director 11 has been updated to support the various hardware and OS changes that have come to pass over the last half-decade, most notably authoring and playback on both Intel-based Macs as well as Windows Vista (this goes for the Shockwave browser plug-in as well, which was finally released natively for Intel Macs in November).

Apart from being able to author on and publish to more recent computers, the other publishing item of note is the addition of the Copy Linked and Dependent Files option in the Publish settings. With this setting enabled, Director does all the heavy lifting for you -- grabbing all of your external assets and placing them where they need to go for your projector or Shockwave file to work properly. For anyone who has ever had to manually gather files in the past -- most likely having a dependency issue once or twice for your trouble -- this is a nice new feature.

So that's the roundup of what's new in Director 11, and with that out of the way, I shall now commence griping.

Boos and Beefs

I've already started the whining inline earlier on (not very many new features, tired interface, hard-to-approach 3D), so I'll go to what is really grinding my gears with Director 11: the fact that it just can't keep up with Flash. I'm not talking about how Adobe has the whole Flash Platform and how Director has been relegated to the JV squad in recent years. I'm talking about how Director is, in theory, a perfect Flash "wrapper" application (long predating AIR, which can do similar things in terms of Flash integration), and I'm hesitant to continue to use it as such since Adobe doesn't seem to want to keep Director up-to-date with the latest Flash capabilities. As of this writing, we're coming up on a full year since Director 11 was released, and there has still been no Flash Asset Xtra update for Director 11. D11 supports Flash 9 content, but only those SWFs authored in ActionScript 2. No AS3, not to mention Flash 10 support, which is, in a word, unacceptable. Coming from a design background, it took me a long time to become comfortable with AS3, and anything I've programmed in Flash since about last Spring can't be used in Director 11. Unfortunately, I got nothing but a canned response about how Adobe doesn't discuss unannounced releases when I asked Adobe's press folks about the Flash Asset Xtra situation -- the latest such query occurring mere hours before this piece was posted. Sadly, even in this era of public Betas out of Adobe and a lot of interaction with the various developer communities about what technologies and advancements are being worked on, the fact that none of this openness seemingly applies to Director is disheartening.

So let's talk CS4. I'm not going to bang on Director too harshly here, seeing as D11 was released a good seven months before CS4, but the fact that Adobe is silent on where Director fits in with all the new bling isn't a good sign as far as I'm concerned. If the goal is to build Director back up into a leading position in multimedia, albeit with different focus areas than Flash, I would ideally want to be able to have some level of integration between Director and the various Creative Suite products, even though Director is not a "member of the club," so to speak. I'd love to have Director share the Photoshop and Illustrator import interface that Flash has sported since CS3. I'd love for Director to offer ActionScript 3 as an officially supported native language (expanding on earlier JavaScript language support as a complement to Lingo). And, of course, I'd really love if Director shared the awesome CS4 design interface that its former Macromedia siblings Dreamweaver and Fireworks have so successfully adopted.

So unless Adobe goes and announces the immediate availability of Director 11.5, boasting zero-day parity with current and future Flash Player releases, an updated interface, and heavy integration with other programs in the CS4 lineup, I have my doubts as to whether Director 11 has any shot of achieving the lofty goals it set for itself after the long layoff.

The Verdict

I'm really torn here. While seeing Director return from a four year hiatus is exciting news in and of itself, the shape it came back in leaves a lot to be desired, which is a sad thing, considering my long personal history with the product. Objectively, whether Director 11 is something worth sinking hard-earned money into largely depends on who you are. If you're an existing user who is still looking to develop projects with Director, then the decision to upgrade should be a no-brainer, as the ability to author on and target recent hardware and operating systems is worth the price of admission all by itself. So as an upgrade, Director 11 earns a Buy rating, with the lack of new features and interface refresh dragging it out of Strong Buy territory.

For new users, the story is a little different. If you're in one of those areas that Director is targeting, like online 3D, education, etc., it's still worth a look. The same goes for developers who need to leverage one of the myriad third-party Xtras to provide custom desktop apps. I'm not going to issue a rating there, other than to say that Director merits close evaluation if you fall into one of those categories. However, if you're looking at a first-time purchase of Director for general multimedia use, I'd say you're better off looking at one of many other more actively developed technologies, most notably Flash. Therefore, it pains me greatly to give Director 11 a Don't Buy recommendation as a new purchase, but issue it I must. However, I'm still going to hedge this a bit, because what is clear to me now is that Director does seem to address a few strong niche areas that make it a valuable tool if your needs happen to cross paths with what it provides. I'd feel a lot better going forward, and indeed, could offer better ratings in the future, if there were clearer signals out of Adobe as far as Director's roadmap goes. However, I have that nagging feeling that the world may just have moved on, and while Director may be around a while longer yet, its best days are seemingly in the rear-view mirror. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, and take some solace in the fact that I often am.

Adobe Director 11 is currently shipping, with full versions priced at $999 and upgrades starting at $299. Be sure to check for updated versions of any third-party Xtras you may have in your workflow before buying.

Filed under: Review on January 9th, 2009
Tags: Adobe, Director

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