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The developer's review of

By: Edmond Garesché

Once again Macromedia has updated the most popular authoring software for sophisticated multimedia delivery. Director 5 provides more power, better performance, expanded platform support, an open architecture, and some really cool new features that will ultimately make this upgrade worthwhile.

Overview
This is an impressive release with a wide variety of new and badly needed features. Our favorites are probably the new onion skinning and sprite alignment tools, but the fact that Director has now switched to using Xtras instead of Xcmds or Dlls's should prove to be the most significant advance. Some of the initial Xtras included with the shipping version of Director 5 show the future potential of Xtras. Xtras written in C or C++ are far more controllable because they allow access to customized interfaces.

The big disappointment is that Macromedia has not come out with an afterburner version that will work with Director 5 as of upload time. Not that I blame them, this is pretty high end stuff, and they are still the only ones out there with these capabilities. But those of you out there who can't wait to see examples of Director's new capabilities with Shockwave, will just have to wait a little longer. But the wait will ultimately be worth it.

Apparently the engineers at Macromedia are working overtime and changing the basic file structure of the Shockwave plug-in to ultimately allow for the capability of streaming. This opens the door for a whole slew of cool features! Now the details are sketchy but when Shockwave for Director 5 is released, it will start to stream data for the most likely choices, and when a choice is made, the unnecessary streams will be cut off. While the user is idle, Shockwave decides on the most likely choice, streams it, and then switches on the fly if another choice is made. This will reduce the download time for movies since only the parts the user wants to see will actually be downloaded. The plans are to ultimately offer Xtras for streaming plug-ins like Real-Audio, Quicktime, or VDOLive. Those extras you will probably have to wait until the third or fourth quarter of this year though.

Xtras
Withthis release, Director ends support for Xobjects and DLLs, replacing them with Xtras. These will be cross-platform bits of C or C++ code that will allow developers to extend Director's usefulness by adding features such as new transitions, Lingo extensions, new types of cast members, or functionality. Included with Director 5 will be the Xtras developers kit along with some example Xtras. Macromedia says that by June there should be more than 20 third-party developers Xtras available.

Interface/Delivery Platform
Director's user interface is still largely the same, but with a revamped look. It has headed further into the Windows arena in both platform support, and its look and feel. Director 5 now sports much more of a Windows looking interface; a toolbar across the top, and pop-up definitions when you pause on any of the buttons for more than a second. Unfortunately, Macromedia has changed many of the keyboard shortcuts so now Command-P prints instead of plays the movie. Director movies can now be authored and played on Macs, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows NT.