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02/24/05
The Yahoo! Toolbar has been included with the Shockwave installer for quite some time. The WeatherBug app has recently been added as well. This gave a lot of fuel to the argument that you should avoid Shockwave for professional work and stick with Flash. Well now that argument is gone as the Flash player also includes the Yahoo! Toolbar now. There’s some question as to whether the Yahoo! Toolbar comes with the automatic installation via IE’s ActiveX control, tho. If not, that means that most people won’t get the Toolbar with Flash like the do with Shockwave.
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02/17/05
Check out Macromedia’s related announcement about the Shockwave player. Basically, what it means is that U.S. users installing Shockwave for the first time will now be asked if they want to install “Weather Bug” as well.
So the complete experience for most users installing Shockwave now includes installations of both the Yahoo Toolbar, Weather Bug and a huge plug for Shockwave.com.
This makes me sad and mad at the same time. After so many complaints from developers about the Shockwave.com promotion years ago, and a huge fuss over the Yahoo Toolbar last year, we now have yet another “unprofessional” element in the Shockwave installer. I know that the proceeds from these revenue streams help to fund Director development and Shockwave player promotion, but I don’t think they are worth the price.
These 3rd-party promotions in the installer hurt developers in two ways. First, potential clients are turned off from using Shockwave because their audience will be hit with these promotions. Second, and more important to me, it means that my Web publications are promoting other products without and compensation to me. If a new user comes to my site for the first time, and then gets the IE auto-install of Shockwave, they will see promotions for Shockwave.com, Yahoo Toolbar and Weather Bug. These three products don’t produce any revenue for my sites and they compete directly with the sponsors of my sites. Heck, Shockwave.com competes directly with my sites period.
Meanwhile, Flash developers pay half the price of Director for their tool and don’t have to deal with any of this. And Macromedia spends probably 10 times the effort developing and promoting Flash.
So to end this rant on a positive note, I must say that it is only because Director is such a fantastically great tool that I will continue to use it.
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02/15/05
Soft launching a new Jigsaw Puzzle site, Just Jigsaw Puzzles, today. It is the latest incarnation of our Jigsaw puzzle games. We were the first on the Web site jigsaws, I believe. I think it was about 1997 or so. In 1999 we went daily, purchasing licensed photos. Haven’t done much with it for years, but I’ve decided to update it and give it its own site. I think it got lost in all the content at our main site.
The game itself is Shockwave, but now a PHP/MySQL program drives the daily updates and database of images. I’ve updated the Shockwave part to use some nicer graphic effect, which were not possible when the original game was done in 1997.
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02/09/05
I’ve been toying with the idea of writing some eBooks. These would be downloadable files, probably PDFs or such. They would deal with specifica topics in Director/Lingo. They wouldn’t be as long as a print book, as they would only deal with a specific topic. But they would include the source code as a .dir.
Is this interesting to any one? What sort of topics would you like to see covered?
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In an effort to show home much Shockwave 3D is used, and how good some of the games are, Mockworld has created Shockwave3D.com. There are now more than 100 games listed.
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