The Back Room

When I started developing interactive exhibits for museums and other institutions, everything was done in Macromedia Director. Flash was there, but it only could do some animations and only very light interaction. Director could do it all, connect to printers, interact with databases, play video, etc. So, for years it was all Director, all the time. But, a few years ago, we came to the realization that Flash had grown enough to start using it for some exhibits, and it actually became necessary for others, where the program might need to be put online as well. Sure, Director can publish to Shockwave, but the installed base is much lower than Flash, and it came with a few bumps, like a mandatory form to fill out on Macromedia’s site with contact information. Flash had a seamless installation and an installed base of over 98% of all web users. Director had failed to see an update in years, and was starting to lose the developers who helped make it the powerhouse it was. So, when I got a project that needed database integration that might need to also live online, I made the switch, and I have really never gone back.

Sure, Director is better at some stuff than Flash. Without making this all about a side by side comparison, it integrates with the operating systems better, allowing easy file writing, connections to external devices (something we do often) and more options on how it displays itself on a system. We solved that here by using small pieces of software to allow Flash to connect to what we need it to. For instance, a recent installation included multiple mice, a serial connection to the museum control system, and a connection to a network server to allow communication among 5 systems. Director was not involved at all, and the system works very well. The overall performance and graphics rendering is better than what I believe we would have gotten with Director.

Director has just come out with its latest version, 11.5. It does add some new features, but unfortunately does not deal with many of the things that cause us to move away from it in the first place. First of all, it has no support for ActionScript 3.0. This is what we write all of our Flash projects in, and is a necessity if we wanted to integrate some of those components into a project. It also maintains a layering system that when using multiple layers of buttons and graphics, becomes unwieldy. There is nominal improvement in graphics playback, but many of the Xtra developers have stopped developing plug-ins because of the general lack of interest in the software. It is good for some 3-D game development, as well as supporting direct use of a number of different media types like QuickTime, WAV files, Mpegs, etc. Flash is fairly limited in this regard to a few media types that it can handle and many file types must be converted to be used. Flash recently introduced support for .h264 encoded video, which we use for most of our encoding now, so that has been a big plus.

Using Flash for the bulk of our programs allows us to post interactive exhibits for easy previewing in the browser, to post online versions of exhibits much quicker and to a broader audience, and to develop, if we need to, completely open source with Flex and other available tools. I have been happy with what we’ve produced for the industry with Flash, and particularly happy with how we’ve been able to integrate with a number of pieces of software and hardware. The introduction of Adobe AIR development has added a lot of tools that Director brought to the table. You can write files, have embedded web browsers, control some interaction with the operating system, etc.

Overall, we still use Director occasionally, but it looks like the development of it as a software platform is gravitating more towards gaming and 3D. For the foreseeable future, we’ll be using Flash as the front end for the bulk of our programs, but it’s all about the user experience, so if there is something that comes along that helps us improve that, we’ll take a look at it.