Long time community supporter Martin Schaefer announced in a public letter that he was going to shut down or transform directorforums.com. Directorforums.com and Directorforums.de provides a valuable news and community source for developers that use Adobe Director to produce standalone and web / shockwave based applications. He goes into some greater detail about his background in Director development.Adobe Director remains a useful tool after all this time, but it has been a rough road – even before Adobe acquired it along with most other Macromedia products.
It was clear to me from the moment that the acquisition was made public that there would be problems for Director. It has an ancient code base, and as a cross platform development tool its has to press the limits of the imaginations of what a developer can come up with – not necessarily as an IDE but what you can produce with it.
When the acquisition was announced, I made some inquiries to see if Paradigma Software could acquire Macromedia Director. What I am willing to say is that there was some discussions with some involved executives. I knew it was a long shot, but in times past I was employed by software vendors in the industry that had creative relationships with Adobe – so just maybe. I think a Paradigma Software Director or Valentina Director could have been an incredible invigoration of the product. I am sure the first release could have had as many bumps as Adobe experienced with Director 11; bringing on a new and remote development team for an old product isn’t easy.
