Information Gift

Meet Director MX

Earlier this week Macromedia announced the availability of the latest addition to the MX suite, Director MX. Updated Shockwave Players were posted yesterday and trial versions were made available for download today.

The big hits for Director MX are OS X compatibility for authoring (OS X and OS 8.6-9 for playback), the ability to use Flash MX created assets, including access to FlashCom and Flash Remoting funtionality (Director MX ships with the Personal version of the Flash Communication Server), QuickTime 6/MPEG4 support, the MX standard interface, debugging and accessibility enhancements including a Speech synthesis xtra.

Upgrades from versions 8 and 8.5 are $399. Order one platform before Jan 2 and get the other platform for half-price.

Watch this space over the next week or so as I post notes about my experience beta testing Director MX, issues you might encounter in upgrading or porting content to OS X, working in the new MX environment and bugs that will have to wait for a future dev/release cycle of Director.

For instance, while the Shockwave player did not change (new functionality is provided by xtras), different installs of the Shockwave Player will report different installed xtras, versions and build versions depending on the install type.

Taking OS X as an example, signifigant changes were made that warranted a version update to 9.0. However, to prevent the breaking of existing plug-in detection schemes Javascript will see the 9.0 plug-in as 8.5.1. The OS X Shockwave install also has the largest number of pre-installed xtras.

The following lists the Shockwave install type, version as reported by Lingo's version and environment.productBuildVersion as well as the installed xtras and their version. 9.0 version xtras support the new functionality of Director MX.

Pay attention to how different install types provide more or fewer xtras; some install types trade a shorter download time for deferred functionality and must download the missing xtra when content requiring that xtra is encounted in a Shockwave movie. As these are Macromedia created xtras, they do not trigger the install dialogs required for third party xtras and so should download and install more transparently.

Take-away here is to avoid surprises by checking your assumptions about what functionality the end user is likely to have by default and how version/build reporting differs across platforms and install types.


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Windows Netscape install
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--runmode & version:
Plugin 8.5.1 net (Bld: 383) PC

TextXtra PPC: 8.5.1
TextAsset PPC: 8.5.1
SWA Streaming PPC Xtra: 8.5.1
SWA Decompression PPC Xtra: 8.5.1
Speech: 9.0
Sound Control: 8.5.1
Shockwave Updater: 8.5.1
Shockwave 3D Asset Xtra: 8.5.1
RealMedia Asset: 8.5.1
QuickTime6 Asset: 9.0
NetLingo PPC Xtra: 8.5.1
NetFile PPC Xtra: 8.5.1
Multiusr: 8.5.1
InetUrl PPC Xtra: 8.5.1
Havok: 1.2
Font Xtra PPC: 8.5.1
Font Asset PPC: 8.5.1
Flash Asset PPC: 9.0
CBrowser PPC Xtra: 8.5.1