Max 2005: Director “Birds of a Feather” Gathering

Thomas Higgins from Macromedia lead a question and answer session tonight for Director developers. About 30 people attended. When asked about the future of Director, he said the he expects a major release in about 12 months, which is good news. But the Director team, which now numbers about a dozen or so, is waiting for the Adobe aquisition to complete before knowning their path for sure.

Big development: Macromedia announced Macromedia Labs today, a Web site that will feature information and alpha builds of future versions of products. It launched today with information about future versions of Flex. Tom said that participation in the Labs is up to the development teams, and that he is very interested in having the Director team be a part of it. This would mean that we might be able to see information and even public alpha versions of Director in the future. He acknoledged that this is a huge departure from the secrect of the past.

One interesting direction for Director that Tom talked about is to take over the Flash wrapper market. Apparently there is a lot of money being made by “wrappers” that create executable files from Flash movies while adding extra functionality like file IO and menu bars. Director, of course, can do just that and is already used by many for this. But even more people look elsewhere for expensive but less capable solutions. So maybe the next version of Director may have some things that offer more for those wanting to wrap Flash movies into robust stand-alone applications.

When asked about what direction he thought the next version of Director may take, Tom offered thoughts that they may try to focus on more powerful features for projectors, since Web-based media is already ruled by Flash. Seems like a decent idea to me.