So I’m checking in on Hash Animation:Master, as I’m wont to do from time to time because apart from being a very neat and inexpensive 3D modeling and animation tool (that doesn’t have Shockwave 3D export, regrettably) they’re based here in the Portland metro area (across the river in Vancouver). I did a review of A:M for MacUser magazine a few years back, but I’ve never really buckled down and become an expert with any of the various 3D packages I’ve bought or used over the years. Just enough to get by has been my motto.
Anyway, I happened into the online tutorial page, and there at the top is a “Get Macromedia Shockwave Player” bug, which was interesting to me because Tom McCrystal had asked on a discussion list the other day who among us had a Shockwave bug on their blog.
My own response was that I think it’s Adobe’s job to promote Shockwave, not mine; that it’s Adobe’s job to promote shockwave.com, not mine; and that I couldn’t think of any helper application that had enticed me to download it because of a bug, rather than some content I wanted to see or hear.
Chalk up one more reason. Nobody knows what the hell Shockwave is. I was pretty surprised to see a Shockwave bug on the tutorial page, and was expecting some sort of Director-based video player when I clicked on the links. But even the computer-savvy guys at Hash have been confused by the decade-long crappy marketing campaign Macromedia ran for Shockwave. All of their training video material actually uses the Flash Player.