ShockWave Review

Only in place since late last year, the technology has already spawned an explosion of inventive new uses, from the educational to the eye-popping. Corporations as diverse as CNN, Apple, General Motors, and MTV have all been already "Shocked." Just try going to the Shockwave version of the normally staid Yahoo page. Suddenly, the "Yahoo" letters start dancing a wild jig-accompanied by a rhythmic, trash-can cacophony of sound.

Or check out the interactive drum kit page, where each click of the mouse on a given drum lets loose digital percussions that would do Peter Gabriel proud. And there's even an on-screen Etch-A-Sketch site. Or how about a pair of disembodied bloodshot eyes whose eerie gaze follows your mouse wherever it goes.
But bandwidth is (as always) an issue. The rule of thumb mentioned in the Shockwave documentation is that at 14.4/28.8 modem rates, it takes approximately one minute to download a 100K file. Nevertheless, stunningly effective presentations - from flying logos, to scrolling banners, to spinning heads and rotating globes - can often be up and running in mere seconds. In fact, Macromedia claims that, due to the efficiency of it's compression algorithm (a facility known as Afterburner), a Shockwave file may ultimately prove smaller than similar static graphics used in many current Web sites.
But what of Sun's Java, and its once all-encompassing promise? There are definite similarities between Shockwave and Java. In each case, you're downloading "executable" content. Both a Java program and a Director movie are software programs of sorts - running on your local computer. As such, Shockwave, like Java, has certain security features built into it in order to protect your system from unwanted network access. But these are pretty much where the similarities end.
In short, Java is a programming language, and a fairly difficult one at that. Director is a user-friendly, multimedia authoring tool. Although Director does contain a simple programming language of its own, Lingo, it is essentially targeted at artists and animators. Java, meanwhile, is meant for hard-core hackers. Even many at Sun now agree that the hoopla over the language's possibilities got carried away. As one person put it, "You're not going to read a 'Java for Dummies' book and then start coding." The power of Java is in its system - level coding abilities - for secure, highly robust, network-aware processing. But if it's simply sound and animation you have in mind, Director is definitely the way to go. A Director movie file doesn't know (or care) whether it's playing over the Net or on a CD ROM. Java clearly does.

Even so, the Macromedia people are covering all of their bases. They recently licensed Java from Sun Microsystems - such that future versions of Shockwave can also provide playback of embedded Java applets. Meanwhile, Shockwave movies can already link to Web URLs. And you can even connect to other Shockwave movies - creating larger content from several smaller ones. The facility also provides for text pulled dynamically over the network - in order to facilitate such things as real time stock quotes and multi-player games.
In a nutshell, Shockwave is the new golden boy, the newly anointed one. But in the manic, six month life-cycle of the Web, the only thing that's safe to say is that nothing stays the same. With an ever growing array of competing Netscape plug-ins - from VRML to full motion video - the battle has clearly only just begun.

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