RE: FLASH: Director7 vs. Flash4

[Harrison, Len]

We've spent a fair amount of time working in Director 7 as well as Flash 4.

Flash is preferred for creating buttons (especially animated ones), for its

scalability (Director has some proprietary vector stuff based on Mac

QuickDraw that doesn't read any PC vector format or allow for clipboard

pasting), for its ease of use, particularly by non-programmers, and for its

relatively clean paradigm and comparative stability.


To do most anything useful in Director you need Lingo and the language is a

hodge-podge kluge. It's been through so many revisions, leaving behind bits

and pieces of previous incarnations (but lacking backward compatibility),

that it contains hundreds of commands and inconsistent syntax. The "." based

property & methods of OOP and pseudo-OOP languages works for some commands

but not for others. The documentation is abysmal particularly with respect

to previous versions of Director. I began with Director 5 which shipped with

something like 5 manuals. The current rev ships with 2 small ones. As others

have pointed out, you need xtras to do many things. We've been using the

DataGrip extra for database connectivity, the Buddy API for system calls,

and Glue32 for true Window's api functionality. Even calling a URL requires

an extra (included with Director). 


Worst of all is the Flash extra which is the poorest implementation of a

Flash player I've seen. SWF's cannot call SWF's into other levels, some

telltargets fail inexplicably for no known reason, and the bottom line is

that each .swf in a compound flash movie (multiple swfs on multiple levels

at once) must be instantiated as a different cast member. You have to code

the cursor switch for buttons and the only pointing finger supplied within

Director is a Mac cursor, not the Windows version. The result for us has

been multiple coding of simple things which see publication as standalone

.exe's, in Web Browsers, and encapsulated within Director. Fortunately the

flash calls don't cause problems in Director and the FSCommands get ignored

without support code.


For serious programming stuff plus multimedia, the *best* environment I've

seen so far is using Flash for buttons, display, interaction, and vector

animation as an .ocx inside of VB or C++ depending on your programming

background. Add a multimedia control and you have much more functionality

and robustness than you get with Director. The only problem here is that the

Flash .ocx has a dependency chain beginning with geturl.dll and fanning out

from there. This chain is based on IE but is registered as a system upgrade,

which means that if IE is *ever* installed, you will be good to go. Even if

it is uninstalled later, these .dlls remain behind. However, for clients who

are adamantly anti-IE (and we have a few), the .ocx is not a solution, at

least as stands. After spending the past three weeks writing system level

calls to multiple applications in Director, however, we are seriously

looking at what would be involved programmatically (and legally) in

registering the necessary .dll's to make the Flash.ocx work from ground

zero. Two things are painfully clear with Director: you cannot subclass

anything and you cannot modify a window's message queue no matter what xtras

you use.


len harrison (

lenhabtcorp [dot] com

)

instructional designer

ABT Corporation




> -----Original Message-----

>

From: james [james_mailingyahoo [dot] com (mailto:james_mailingyahoo [dot] com)]

> Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 1999 7:53 AM

>

To: flasherchinwag [dot] com

> Subject: RE: FLASH: Director7 vs. Flash4

> 

> 

>

--- Judy Miller <judycreativeartist [dot] com> wrote:

> > Hello,

> > Get yourself right back to that book store, and if

> > it is anything like

> > Chapters where you can grab a cuppa Java and sit

> > yourself down on a nice

> > cushy couch and read, pick up the copy of Special

> > Edition , Using Director 7

> > by Gary Rosenzweig. He has some real world examples

> > and also check out some

> > of the SOTD on MM that use Director as opposed to

> > Flash and you will see a

> > whole new world.

> > ---

> I've definately noticed a difference like with

> shockwave.com, but I wonder if that's just because the

> limits of Flash4 haven't been pushed.  Look at what

> shockfusion.com did... it's great!  A few months back

> no one thought that a full fledged chat or discussion

> forum could be integrated into Flash.   So, I'm just

> trying to really keep my eyes open.

> 

> And for some reason, to me anyway, shockwave/director

> apps seem more bulky... take a lot longer to load and

> that darn shockwave assistant thingy always opens up

> when I visit a shocked site.

> 

> Flash4 just seems cleaner and less imposing.  Again,

> though, I value the feedback and am looking for real

> world experiences if possible.  Thanks for the book

> tip!

> 

> 

> 

> =====

> 

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