Whilst your case is compelling and I appreciate the points, I'm still not sure.
For instance, an analogy - macs pretty much suck as web servers. Whilst
unix boxes are the most popular servers, macs indeed are an extremely
popular second. There is no 'good technological' or even 'stylistic'
reason for this. (Except maybe that admin costs are lower - that's the
only rational reason.) The reason is that in the harsh world the web is an
ever-increasingly highly commercial place. Ad agencies and designers and
the like set up servers for their clients and so use a mac. There's a
preponderance of weight there.
In a sense you (Taylor) are talking from a 'high-end' approach. You
personally are in fact virtually a web 'reseracher' at perhaps the
trendiest, most cutting edge of all web sites! However consider your
average joe who is running a web shop with 4 or 5 employees and is putting
on 2 or 3 clients a week, building web sites for, um, American Business (
<; ) .. it's an ad agency paradigm with full-on ad agency type people.
You were mentioning the difficulties of lingo .. Observe that one can,
actually, put an ad in the paper and actually hire 'creative' people who
can run lingo and director quite well. [When I say 'creative' I just mean
someone who can actually do graphic design, cut a logo, scan properly, kern
type, do a layout and so on, as well as living in a loft <:] In NY you
could hire ten, maybe twenty 'creative' people who can run lingo and
director quite well tomorrow.
But now consider trying to find people who are actually 'creative' or
'graphic designers' and who can, indeed, program in java. There's you,
that's one! List the names of anyone else for me? I submit there are
truly very few 'creative graphic arts' types who don't scream in terror
when you mention java or c or the like. As a practical matter I've
interviewed maybe, oh, 10 people who were hopefully 'java .. plus cool
graphic artists' and they've to a man/woman been in fact 'java .. clueless
about design' and not the sort of person one could share a studio with a
serious sound system with <;
So you could be right .. the analogy here could be that, um, electric power
is obviously just better than gas power in relation to lighting houses, so,
in fullness of time all houses were lit using electric power.
On the other hand, I maintain that (possibly) the better analogy is, sure,
midengine two seater cars are "much better" in the absolute, but the vast
majority of personal transport is achieved by a four door Camry.
In other words, java could be the cutting edge that will in fact become
ubiquitous (just like 288 modems), or, perhaps, it is more a high end thing
(like, um, 21 inch monitors). I don't know the answer. Incidentally there
are a couple of fun shockwave games at macromedia.com (which are actually
not good examples at all of what I'm talking about! <;)
Quark is making a nice shokwave-like plug in which will do most everything
most people (correction, most of 'American Business'!) would want on a web
site - it's pretty cool.
With all these sort of web-specific, you-too-can-do
-multimedia-looking/GUIish/stuff/even-if-youre -just-an-art-director things
coming out .. well you can see what I mean.
I hear no less than three (3!) copies of Alanis Morissette playing
currently in the building! Whatever happened to bjork .. ?
Does anyone know/remember what year Infected came out? (The The.) (And
whatever happened to The It ?)
- peekaboo
>Also sprach 'jp may' :
>>Not really. The advantage of Director is simple interaction with the mouse,
>>keyboard etc. I think the 'very typical' shockwave module is the roll-over
>>trick .. you know, you have five buttons and each one lights up when your
>>mouse is over it? And then maybe blows up or something when you click.
>>The General Motors web site is shockwavized, for example, I believe.
>
>But that level of interaction is extreamly basic. There are a number of
>authoring tools and freeware already that can accomplish that. A button
>with a mouseOver action and an OnClick action I believe exists as a
>freeware tool for Java, and there are plugins in the works to accomodate a
>simplistic funtionality. If that is all you want to do with it you could
>pay $49 or less for a tool that just did that or $1,000 plus $500 an
>upgrade for director.
>
>Director's stregnth is it's ability to quickly and easily handle large
>graphics and other computer media and sequence them into a presentation.
>Going beyond a simple interaction requires a learning curve most people
>arn't willing to take. Other more advanced (by virtue of coming out later)
>authoring tools such as mTropolis are much better at handling interactions
>between abstract objects, and are more powerful at creating enviornments.
>Though director still blows them away at sequencing linear animations.
>
>And reletively soon, we will start getting applications written in java.
>So your development tools, and your output will be in java. And these
>should be even more suited to the network. Becuause as director grew up
>with CDrom, and C grew up with PCs, java grows up with the net. The tools
>and the medium will adapt themselves to each other.
>
>>Again, who cares about animations, shockwave is good for creating, um,
>>little GUIs I suppose you could say!, adding sounds etc
>
>Shockwave gui's suck. The list of "Shocked!!" sites on the Dirct-L
>homepage is written in shockwave. I can't open two windows and drag and
>drop links into a browsing window and keep the list in another window, you
>can't see where the link will take you, or if you've been there already,
>and when you return back to the page loading the shockwave applet from the
>cache takes considderably longer.
>
>>Surely you see my point .. the average agency Art Director, freelance
>>graphic designer, commercial artist, computer illustrator, video graphic
>>maker, etc etc (1) uses macs (2) lives in a loft (3) knows photoshop &
>>quark inside out (4) frequently has some familiarity with Director (5)
>>almost definitely knows nothing whatsoever and will never know anything
>>whatsoever about computer programming.
>
>Hmmm..... Who gipped me of my loft?
>
>To do anything interesting in director will involve a lot of scripting.
>The learning curve of lingo is approximate to any computer language.
>Except that you dont have to declare the variables at every scripting cell
>and I can choose my editor.
>
>>In the analogy, sure, if say WalMart is installing an accounting system,
>>they will hire 750 brilliant cobol programmers (for the database) and 500
>>genius C cutters (for a custom kernel) for their Stratas, but so what? The
>>tens of thousands of accountants around the land just use 'dBase III' (or
>>whatever the program is that accountants use).
>
>My point isn't necessarily that shockwave is bad, java is good. More that
>shockwave is not the tool for the net. It may be attractive now because is
>a commonly used multimedia authoring tool that contains a plugin. But
>since web publishing is fast becoming big business people are writing
>custom tools to do the job. Shockwave just isn't that tool.
>
>>Also for consideration ...
>>
>>The download to achieve X with a shockwave module seems to me to be,
>>usually, far smaller than the download to achieve X if you write it from
>>scratch in java.
>
>But java will soon run at near native speeds. Shockwave never will. Java
>is built with a network in mind, so are tools built from java. Shockwave
>will always have director's linear, score based paridigm. Which just
>doesn't work for net based communications.
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>You need to lurk. L - U - R - K Lurk
>---------------------------------------------the ouija to lauri anderson----
>taylor@taylor.org
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