Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

Have not used Macromedia Director for formal project development since version 7. Played with version 8 very briefly when shockwave 3d was introduced. I was helping a colleague (John Bratlien) in the last few days to finish a project on delivering 3D models with photographic textures via web browsers. The project was initiated by an Adobe Atmosphere grant. Atmosphere was a new application by Adobe to implement interactive 3D applications on the web. The program and browser plug-in was quite solid except lack of cross-platform support. For unknown reasons, Adobe decided to discontinue the product in the New Year. My colleague then turned to Java to seek for further solutions in delivering 3D objects with OpenGL support through a web interface. Due to a tight deadline, we decided to give Director MX a try. Quite amazingly, Shockwave 3D and director lingo made the project development so simple and we successfully delivered the demo product to the faculty member on Thursday evening. Due to further development is needed for the project, I will leave the detailed descriptions to later posts, but for those of you who are still frustrated with the discontinuation of Atmosphere, give Macromedia Director MX (or Diector MX 2004) a try, it may just save you some time. [to be continued...]