ShockWave Review

The developer's review of MacroMedia's

By: Steve Meloan

Ghostly footprints pad slowly across the Web page before you, each crunching ominously in the sand. Is it your imagination? Java? No, it's simply one of the many far-flung and eye-catching new sites utilizing Macromedia's new Shockwave facility.
Just when it seemed as if anything having to do with sound and animation on the Web might fall handily within the realm of Sun's much-touted Java facility, along comes a new paradigm shift. Welcome to the "Shockwave for Director" plug-in. With the plug-in capacity of their recent 2.0 release, the Netscape browser now allows software developers to seamlessly integrate their latest cutting edge facilities into the Web.
With Shockwave, Netscape and Macromedia have joined forces to bring the (arguably) premier multimedia development tool to the World Wide Web. According to their joint press release - "Shockwave for Director delivers high-impact, interactive multimedia productions to the WWW by bringing optimized Director productions - with interactive graphics, sounds, and animation - to the Internet."
Director has already become somewhat the de facto standard for multi-media development in the CD ROM industry. Targeted at graphic artists, animators, writers, and other creative non-programmers, the authoring tool has built up a considerable following and body of work over the years. And with the Director playback engine now integrated into the Netscape browser, this same content can now be seamlessly presented on the Internet-based desktop - appearing alongside and intermingled with the familiar text and graphics of the Web. In essence, anything that was once a static graphic can now be replaced with a Director movie.
The facility is already up and running for both Windows and Mac. And in addition to Netscape, both Microsoft and Silicon Graphics plan to integrate the Shockwave Director player into their own browsers. Even such mainstream laggards as CompuServe and America Online are soon slated to "get Shocked."
Many predict that the development will jump-start true multimedia content for the Web. And this will, in turn, bring the medium ever closer to interactive television - rather than the current text and graphics, print-media paradigm. Anything you can do on a CD ROM can now also be presented over the Web. And from the user perspective, all you do is download the Shockwave plug-in, put it in Netscape's plug-in folder - and, voila!
Further, rather than having to train and season an entire body of software developers in a new and rather arcane programming language such as Java (which is a sub-dialect of the difficult C++ language), Shockwave brings to the fore an estimated army of 300,000 Director-ready developers. It also provides a massive body of already existent Director-based content - which can now be instantly cross-purposed to the Web. And, like Java, Shockwave allows multimedia developers to "Author Once, Play Anywhere." In other words, the content can be developed on the platform of choice - and then played back on CD-ROM, the Internet, diskette, or even Interactive TV.