Top Stories by Andrew M. Phelps
The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and the Information Technology
Department where I teach, has long been a user of Macromedia products, from
Dreamweaver to Director and most things in between. Recently, there has been
some debate as to the future of Director's role, considering the increasing
use of Flash in the marketplace for Web graphics and interactive displays.
While we have moved some of our efforts to Flash technologies, RIT and the IT
Department remain committed to the use of Director, because currently no
other product on the market can meet our specific needs for an
easy-to-script, but performance-aware 3D system capable of delivery on the
Web and via downloadable executable.
The shift to ECMAScript syntax represents a major advance in the Director ... (more)
Hello! I wanted to wait and formally greet you from the Macromedia MAX
Conference in New Orleans. Some of you might know me from my writing at
Director-Online, or from the Macromedia DevNet Center. Others are probably
reading this and saying to themselves "Hey... wait a minute... where's
James..." In any event, I wanted to report on the conference, give you a
taste of what happened in ca... (more)
Shockwave3D (S3D), despite a number of advantages such as delivery on the Web
and small plug-in size, suffers from a few disadvantages in terms of its
architecture. One of the "classic problems" with regard to the way S3D is
built is the inability of the developer to manipulate exactly when objects
are drawn to the screen, or more correctly the order in which they are drawn
to the screen... (more)
Recently in a Shockwave3D project, I had some problems with the
modelsUnderRay command. More precisely, modelsUnderRay seemed to have some
problems of its own. Occasionally it just didn't give the correct result, it
would miss a model somehow. In the particular application I was building (a
landscape that let the user's drive a car around on the surface), this was
dramatic because the wh... (more)
Director has three things going for it that are unique in both the Macromedia
and Adobe product lines: Imaging Lingo (or JavaScript), Shockwave 3D, and DVD
support
It's the middle of summer, and it's particularly hot this year. I suppose the
same could be said of multimedia content tools. I've seen a ton of new
products this year, each of which looks interesting in its own way. In
prepp... (more)