Category: Director

One thing that was astounding to me about writing books on Director is how outsized my credentials appeared. In mid-1995 when I started working as a freelance digital file manipulator, I had never worked professionally in Director, although I’d been messing around with it for a couple of years and had actively been looking for projects. I lucked into a job actually teaching Director at Portland State University by being in the right place at the right time and proving that I knew enough to teach an introductory course. Then I chanced into the Shockwave book at the end of the year and I had a little bit of celebrity in the small Director pond. But it wasn’t based on any actual work I’d done, and as time went on and I did more writing gigs and continued teaching, I couldn’t really share stories about the cool kiosk or online gig I’d had because they just didn’t exist. I wasn’t exactly a fraud because I never represented myself as anything other than a writer and demonstrator of techniques, but there were times when I sure felt out-classed by the people I was hanging out with.

What was worse was that people were always eager to see me. I’d met up with developers on a London trip shortly after the publication of my first book, hung out with the infamous Peter “Lingo Sorcery” Small at his home, and visited James Newton, as I’ve already mentioned. Amsterdam was the superlative of these visits, because people actually travelled for significant periods of time (about as long as you can travel in the Netherlands) to get together at a cafe and drink some beers. From left to right in the photo above: Mark Reijnders (whose iPhone app “Clean My Screen” is currently available); Lucas Meijer (the 3D guru I’d met at UCON 2001 just a couple months earlier, now working for Unity); Mark Hagers (still doing the digital media thing); and Pim van Bochoven (Mr. OSControl Xtra who is always doing incredibly cool things). I knew why I wanted to meet them but why the hell did they want to meet me?

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of my entry into consumer digital photography.

A decade ago today we made a very special Director pilgrimage. I’d had the luck to be hired as a contractor to write code for the Behavior Library on versions 7 and 8 of Director. What made it a real honor was that the other contractor for on the project was James Newton, who even then was a font of Lingo wisdom that I could only aspire to.

We had worked on our chunks of code separately (as should be obvious from any comparison of James’s tight programming style to my more haphazard messes) but there was a certain amount of contact through a variety of channels, and when I knew we were headed to Europe in 2001 I contacted him to see if we could get together in person. At the time, just after the release of Director 8.5, he was living in his native Scotland, a fair piece outside of Glasgow in a town called Dunoon.

Barbara and I hopped across the Irish Sea from Dublin to Glasgow, where James picked us up in his van, then drove us to his home via the ferry at Gourock (this picture was taken 29 April 2001) where we had a delightful couple of days visiting with James and his family, eating paté, pizza, and an after-dinner apertif of chocolate and Scotch.

You couldn’t ask for a nicer host. Or guide to the vagaries of Director.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of my entry into consumer digital photography.

[click to enlarge]

It’s the latest game sweeping the nation! This three-photo panorama was taken at the first event I attended with my then-new digital camera, ten years ago today. It’s a meeting room in Macromedia HQ where a number of Director developers were given a close-up look at Shockwave 3D (then nicknamed “Tron”) which would be released at the Macromedia User Conference the following spring. Name as many developers as you can!

Here’s a preliminary agenda for the upcoming Tron Beta Seminar here at Macromedia January 18th and 19th (1 week away!). So far we’ve got 46 attendees, with room for 53. Submit requests for attendance directly to me. Hope to see you here. (Note the special opportunity for showing your own stuff to the group Thursday evening)

Thursday January 18th

Time Session / Speaker

9:30am Hello and Introductions / James Khazar
Coffee & doughnuts

10:00 Tron Basics Seminar
Terry Schussler
Terry’s a great teacher and he’ll
be giving us a good part of a day
with a high-level overview of what
it takes to get cool stuff built
with Tron. Lunch in there somewhere.

5:30 Q&A / Terry & Engineering
Your chance to ask the experts
about Tron

6:00 Snacks and Show&Tell
to Several of our partners and your
when- fellow developers have a chance
ever to show off some cool stuff.
>>> If you’d like to participate,
>>> let me know directly.

Friday January 19th

Time Session / Speaker

9:30am Good Morning Mixer
Bagels

10:00 3D Max Optimizations and Workflow
Jeff Abouaf, our resident 3D Max
expert will show you the tricks
and gotchas of bringing your
3D Max models into Tron.

11:00 3D Behaviors
Kraig Mentor, Director Engineer
and author of the new 3D behavior
set talks about their use and
other lingo goodies.

12:00 Tron Tips
Tom Higgins, QA staffer and
3D aficionado demonstrates his
vast knowledge of Tron.

12:30 Lunch & Demos
How’s Pizza sound?
See some cool short demos.

2:00 Multiuser Server
David Simmons, the Godfather of
MUS, shows off the new features.

2:30 QA Scenario Test
Christophe Leske and Buzz Kettles
walk you through our Zoombot
case study.

3:00 Sapient’s Real World Experience
aka Human Code, they’ve developed
some complete projects for us with
and will take you through their
experiences with Tron.

3:30 Engineering Team Managers Tell All
Meet the Director Team managers

4:00 Marketing and Promotional News
Find out how we plan to make Tron
the biggest thing to hit the web
since browsers and how we can help
promote your Tron infused site.

4:30 Q&A part duex
Last chance to put your questions
directly to the team

5:30 End of Day

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of our entry into consumer digital photography.

It’s hard to remember—in this world where every cell phone has a camera, you can have a face-to-face video conversation from a smart phone, and even Barbie is enhanced with more than just plastic breasts—that the whole digital photo thing didn’t hit the consumer world more than about ten years ago.

Digital cameras weren’t exactly new. Working in the printing business in the early 1990s I’d been around as the early professional models were having the kinks worked out of them. Those cost tens of thousands of dollars and most were tethered to a computer for storage. But it wasn’t until 1999-2000 that the first models broke the $1,000 price barrier. Being the good little digital consumer that I was I went out to buy one.

Barbara and I were heading to Hawaii just after Christmas, along with my parents and brother and neither of us had a camera that was in working order. I bought what was then a relatively low-end but decent-quality model: the Canon PowerShot S20.

The S20 had 3.3 megapixels of resolution, which was somewhat offset by the fact that the memory card that shipped with the camera held only 8MB. It being the beginnning of the digitized decade, extra memory chips weren’t in every Walgreen’s or corner grocery; you had to order them online or go to a photo shop and pay an outrageous price to expand to 16MB or—if you were packing a wad of cash—32MB. Or take a few shots and download them to your computer ASAP. I deleted a lot more shots directly from the camera back in those early days than I do now when I have the luxury of a memory chip with literally orders of magnitude more capacity.

The S20 got a lot of work in its first months. A slip on a path in Hawaii dropped it on lava rock, leaving a dent on the corner next to the flash. A couple of weeks later I was in San Francisco for a meeting at Macromedia of the “Director Advisory Council.” Back to San Francisco in February for one of a FlashForward conference (oddly, I don’t appear to have taken any photos of the last trip I made to NYC, in April for the Macromedia UCON). Then it was off across the country and the Atlantic for the wedding of my friends Eric Rewitzer and Annie Galvin in Ireland, followed by a stay with Director developer James Newton, and a week in Amsterdam where we met up with even more Director folks.

Eric, who was working in the middle of the digital media world at Apple at the time, told me in later years that I was one of the first people he knew with a digital camera and that the pictures I sent them of the wedding and surrounding events were the main digital record they had. That wouldn’t happen now.

The Canon’s sort of a brick compared to my iPhone or the svelte, higher-resolution cameras you can pick up for an eighth the price I paid a decade ago, but it still takes good photos and it’s been stolidly reliable. Below is a picture of an old friend of mine after work as we were getting ready to grab a beer. It’s the fourth picture I took with the S20. The first three photos were deleted long ago.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of our entry into consumer digital photography.

Kudos to Critical Path Software for getting gobbled up by eBay.

A dozen years ago, back when I had an office across from the then-under-construction Westin Hotel, Critical Path was in an adjacent building on the northwest corner of SW Broadway & Alder. My office partners, graphic designer Brad Hicks and Flash developer/animator Peter Sylwester collaborated on a web site for the Critical Path, with Brad designing the fish skeleton logo that they’ve used ever since and Peter helping to get the whole thing into shape.

A couple of times, Critical Path asked me to collaborate on bids when the projects they’d been asked to take on included Director content—most of their work at the time was Mac ports of software, from hardware drivers to CD-ROMs—but it wasn’t until they brought me the first of the UbiSoft CSI games (which included some Shockwave 3D content) to port to the mac that I actually was able to do anything for them. I managed to help out on a couple of other projects in the years since.

A number of the folks I play poker with have worked for (or are working once again for) Critical Path, and every time I’ve talked to CEO Steve Romero I’ve told him I need to invite him out to pay him back for having us over a party. That’s probably going to be a harder date to make now that he’s a vice president at eBay!

Another day, another conference that I should be at. I got a LinkedIn request the other day from Dan Spirn, who was the other presenter on the panel of the first conference I spoke at, the 1997 Macromedia UCON, which brought up some old memories, but it ain’t happening any more.

Another Adobe MAX went by the other day without so much as my disembodied voice. And today Unite 2010 kicked off in Montreal for Unity developers. It would have been cool but the $30 I made from my Unity-developed iPhone game just didn’t put it in the picture (although I am wearing my 2004 MAX — New Orleans — shirt at this moment).

Have a great time in Montreal everybody. Get Tom Higgins to buy you some drinks. You know he will.

I went to balance my business checking account yesterday and saw that there was a $30 deposit on the last day of September that I certainly didn’t remember. A quick check into its origins showed that it was from Apple, of all places. And by signing into my iPhone developer account I was able to determine that it was, indeed, a disbursement from sales of Bedeviled, which has been out now for fifteen months (as of Sunday).

So I’ve finally made some money off the iPhone boom. Thanks to those of my friends and colleagues who bought a copy! Only a couple thousand dollars more and I’ll have broken even on the new computer, the copy of Unity, the iOS devices, the books and other stuff that made it possible!

It’s been a very quiet month here at darrelplant.com. I know. I haven’t really had a lot to say on politics except in reaction to things, and I usually leave those in comments at other sites and blogs. I fire up Twitter only every couple of days, mostly just to see what other people are up to, although I did have a brief exchange with iPhone author @jeff_lamarche the other day about 1970s editions of Dungeons & Dragons boxed sets. And I’ve been checking in on Facebook to keep in touch with Director-Xtra-developer-turned-poker-pro Tomer Berda as he’s been playing in the European Poker Tour events in Estonia and Portugal this month.

But the main reason the blog’s been so quiet is that all of a sudden I have a handful of projects. Not just any projects but Director projects. And just to crank the bizarre to 11, they’re Director 8.5 projects. Technically, I guess that would be cranking the bizarre back from 11 (or 11.5). I’ve even had to buy a couple of Xtras (from Tomer, natch) for the first time in seven years.

I’m not chalking this up to some resurgence in Director, but the work is certainly welcome after several years of drought.

Just over a month ago I posted an item about Tomer Berda, the DirectXtras developer who’s turned poker pro and who took fifth place (and $117K) in one of the early tournaments of the 2010 World Series of Poker, which has been running since Memorial Day weekend in Las Vegas.

After emailing congratulations to him, Tomer was gracious enough to offer me some time to talk over poker, so I flew down to have lunch with him a week or so after his win. We sat for four hours in his favorite Thai restaurant a mile from the din of the Rio, I watched him eat a couple of lunches, he gave me more tips about playing poker than I can remember, and he told me about his life as a professional poker player and expressed his hope that he could win a bracelet at this year’s WSOP (the bracelet being the award given to first-place finishers in addition to a hefty sum of money).

After his early win, it wqas a frustrating series for Tomer. There are about twenty general No Limit Hold’em tournaments during the series, and Tomer entered most of them, not making it past the first day of competition after his showing in Event 5 (the events tend to run three to five days depending on the number of entrants, which varies with the buy-ins of $1,000 to $5,000). The last tournament before the Main Event had a $2,500 buy-in, and 1,941 entrants. Big-name players like Daniel Negranu, Chris Moneymaker, and Phil Ivey fell by the wayside in the first day; an extra day had to be added to the schedule because of a late start, computer glitches, and a larger-than-expected field.

This event went better for Tomer, though, and just about midnight, after three hours of wild back-and-forth with Vladimir Kochelaevskiy over the chip lead, Tomer finally shut him down, winning his first WSOP bracelet and nearly $826,000. I would have loved to have seen it in person myself, but Tomer had some family there rooting for him, including his father (in the picture with Tomer).