With the release of Director 8.0 Shockwave Studio, do I still regard Macromedia's Multi Media Authoring Tool as sensational, delightful and orgasmic?  I'll let you decide for yourselves as you read through the goodies that have been added to this suddenly new looking old-timer.  (Want to know more about Director itself, read last year's Director 7 Review, click here).

NEW FEATURES

Authoring

The Property Inspector - One of the most important changes in Director 8 is the enhanced Property Inspector.  Well, it seems to me that finally all those hard to find bits and pieces have been put into the one place.  The new Director 8 Property Inspector automatically switches context to match the current selection, whether that be movie, sprite or stage properties.  Select multiple objects to modify common properties between similar or different object types.  Edit all your media types, including movie, stage, bitmaps, sounds, Quicktime, vector shapes, Flash SWF and behaviours.

A major enhancement and time saver for director developers.

Zoomable Stage - Something that was definitely missing from Director 7, the ability to zoom the stage while not affecting logical sprite sizes.

Cast Window List - Casts now come equipped with extensive lists, all those hard to find bits of information, like sprite number and cast member numbers are all displayed in the one place.  The thing I like about this new Cast Manager is that cast lists can be sorted easily by any column in the list and authors can now put comments next to a cast member.  A great new feature, especially for someone like me, poor short term memory.

Sprite/Stage

Lockable Sprites - How many times have you moved the wrong sprite, after spending hours getting things into just the right location.  Get things perfect, then lock those sprites into position.  A huge plus.

Guides On Stage - Finally, as well as grids we can use guides on the Stage.  Enough said I think.

Multiple Curve Vector Shapes - Enhanced and even better vector shape manipulation.

Shockwave Changes

Publish Command - So, you want a Shockwave movie, just select the Publish command and both the html file and the .dcr file are created automatically.  You're then taken to the browser to preview your director movie in Shockwave.  Oh and there is a choice of html templates, hidden under File, Publish Settings.  You're still in control of file locations etc. but this new feature makes publishing shockwave movies on the net much easier.

Scalable Shockwave - So, lets take a Shockwave movie and stretch it to fit the browser window while preserving the original aspect ratio, Director 8 now offers this exciting new feature.

BitMap Compression - Bitmap files too large for the net, well problem solved, Director 8 allows jpeg compression for bitmap cast members in a .dcr file.

Lingo

Linked Lingo Scripts - I'm glad you were sitting down while reading about this new feature.  At last, lingo scripts can sit on the hard drive and be linked externally or internally.  An added bonus being you can use any text editor to make your scripts, so all those lingo script editor blues will soon be forgotten.  And, let's not forget how easy it will be to import those standard scripts you use all the time.

Imaging Lingo - lets you create and manipulate bitmap images entirely in Lingo. With runtime imaging, developers have complete control over the Director and Shockwave rendering engine for off-screen image compositing, impressive on-screen effects, image manipulation, and graphics generation.  Graphics on the fly, so to speak.

Sound Control Lingo - precise professional quality control of sound playback, stereo affects built in.  Erm, I guess I mean - You can use Lingo to modify the computer's sound level to suit the needs of your movie, or to modify the volume of the sound channel itself.  The best news for me was that mp3's are among the supported file types.

So, I guess I still do love this delightful product, it's easy to use and with these enhancements quite wonderful.   My review of Director 7 (a year ago) ended with this quote, and I feel justified in repeating myself here - "Director 8 is like Flash on steroids times twenty".