Introduction

Director MX 2004 is Macromedia's premiere multimedia development application. Director delivers high-performance sprite-based animation and tight sound and video integration with most current technologies including DVD, two object-oriented scripting languages (Lingo and JavaScript) capable of programmatically driving nearly every aspect of Director, Macromedia Flash integration (you can use Flash movies as sprites in Director and have access to ActionScript code within Director), Internet functions for communicating with CGI (computer-generated imagery) and other users, access to the user's hard drive when running locally, and Xtras. Xtras are plug-ins that extend Director to give it new capabilities, and are created by a large development community. Some Xtras ship with Director; others are created by independent, or third-party, developers. Some are free and some are notas you might expect. Your projects can be published to either Windows or Macintosh platforms and delivered on CD/DVD-ROM or the Web using the Shockwave browser plug-in.

Some of the many projects that I've created with Director include a fully 3D version of the arcade classic Q*Bert, a dynamic slide presentation system, a large E-learning application with online scoring and student tracking, small 3D games for trade shows that were used to attract visitors to the booth, a 3D CADD application targeted at kids, an electronic journal for swimmers, and animated greeting cards, to name only a few. As you can see from the variety, Director doesn't constrain you to anything in particular. I've come to believe that will allow you to do pretty much anything that you can think of.