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Software Review: Director 7 Shockwave Internet Studio

Learning to Behave

Director includes a built-in library of "behaviors" which enable the developer to add and use interactive elements such as navigation, user-interface widgets, custom controls, lists, and timers. These are accessed through the new Director 7 Library palette (See Figure 1), and added to your Director movie by simply dragging them to the Director Stage or Cast library.

Depending on the behavior, you may have to add some parameters which indicate the specifics of the behavior, but it's a simple matter of filling in a field in a pop-up window.

Figure 1 (at right) Director's Behaviors Toolbar

Our next task was to take a look at Fireworks, Macromedia's graphics solution for Web developers. We previously reviewed Fireworks and weren't too impressed, but the latest version of Director comes with some significant improvements which will increase your reasons for using Fireworks.

This release of Director now supports JPEG files (as well as animated GIFs and PNG files) internally; Shockwave has supported external JPEGs for a while now, but the browser overhead and delay didn't really encourage their use.

Now a developer can include many JPEGs in a single Shockwave file, which improves the download time greatly. Fireworks allows you to visually optimize your JPEGs using its Export Preview (See Figure 2). This enables the developer to find a decent balance between image quality and compression.

Figure 2 Fireworks' Export Preview

Features of Fireworks include:

• Onscreen optimization for GIF, JPEG, and PNG files
• Live Effects for drop shadows, embosses, bevels, and glows at the click of a mouse
• Slicing tools for easy production of cast members from a single composition
• Bitmap editing tools: brush, pencil, fill, clone, marquee, lasso, and crop
• Vector editing tools: bezier, reshape, circle, star, rectangle, and line
• Frames for GIF animations
• Layers for document organization
• Rollover states for buttons
• Automatic production code for HTML tables, JavaScript rollovers, and image maps

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