This article explores Macromedia Director by providing an overview of how to use the tool. While prototyping and usability testing are important throughout the development process, Macromedia Director will mainly be presented as a tool to be used during the analysis and design phases. Multimedia-rich programs can be developed with little programming skill. Alternatively, advanced users can tap into Director's complexities with some programming experience. Traditionally, Director has been used to create presentations, games, and training software as stand alone executables or as programs to be played Web browsers via the Shockwave plug-in.
Director is also useful for the prototyping and usability testing stages of software development.
Director is a visual development environment that accepts several types of multimedia and text files. The executables that are created can be saved as either .EXE files or Java files. Because Director can export projects to Java, it can be used to save time in creating a project in other Java development environments. Although HTML can be used for prototyping, Director supports more file formats than most Web browsers and allows complex scripting. However, VB can only be used on a Windows platform, whereas Director is suitable for use on both Macintosh and Windows platforms.