Prepress
Adobe Launches Director 11
Thursday 28. February 2008 - Major Product Upgrade Advances Multimedia Authoring Environment
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe Director 11 software, a major upgrade to the companys powerful multimedia authoring tool for building interactive applications and rich content. The latest release contains a flexible and easy-to-use authoring environment enabling multimedia authors, animators and developers to create powerful interactive applications, games, e-learning and simulation products.
With Director 11 or a combination of Director 11 and the Adobe Shockwave Player, users can author once and publish content for the Web, CDs/DVDs and the desktop simultaneously. This robust environment complements Adobes ecosystem of creative products, enabling users to add Adobe Flash SWF files to Director projects, play them in Director and Shockwave, and easily edit them with Adobe Flash CS3 Professional. In addition, Director 11 supports a wide variety of third-party add-ons creating the most extensible authoring environment possible. Director 11 also enables content creators to localize applications through Unicode, create new levels of lifelike motion in games and simulations with the Ageia PhysX physics engine, and deliver more engaging experiences with enhanced text and native 3D rendering.
“With the new Director 11, users can unleash their creative capabilities and broaden their market reach with less effort, producing more engaging multimedia applications in less time,” said Naresh Gupta, senior vice president, Print and Publishing at Adobe. “This milestone release provides a strong and flexible authoring environment that perfectly complements Adobes broad suite of authoring products, extending our customers creative reach to interactive 3D animations and games.”
Providing the broadest support for industry standard audio, video and image files, Director 11 also boasts powerful new features, including support for Adobe Flash 9 technology and bitmap filters to simplify adding characteristics, such as shadowing or glow, to text or images. The product offers language support with both JavaScript and Lingo the native scripting language of Director for programming in more than one language, as well as an enhanced script browser to save programming time by breaking out the code and code snippets with drag and drop capability.
“No other technology can deliver hardware-accelerated 3D entertainment on a Web page to as many people worldwide as Director and Shockwave,” said Gene Endrody, CEO and founder, MaidMarian.com, a developer of Web-based games specializing in community oriented multiplayer games. “Director 11 enhances the ability to develop fast action 3D interactive games and virtual products, with cost efficiency, cross-platform compatibility and browser plug-in penetration superior to other authoring environments on the market.”
Pricing and Availability
Adobe Director 11 is expected to be available by the end of March 2008. International versions in French, German and Japanese are expected to ship by June 2008. Director 11 is priced at US$999 for the full product and US$299 for an upgrade from the prior three versions. Educators can purchase Director 11 for US$299 and students in select regions including the United States may purchase Director 11 for US$99. The product runs on multiple operating systems, including Microsoft Windows XP with Service Pack 2, Windows Vista and Mac OS X version 10.4 on Intel-based Macintosh systems. Shockwave runs on all of those systems as well as Mac OS X 10.4 on PowerPC-based Macintosh systems.