At 20:24 -0600 04/02/2002, js33 wrote:
>I have never learned anything of substance from a MAC user.
I take it then none of my posts regarding such things as image
manipulation, encipherment and so on have had any merit for you.
That's too bad, because even if the specific topic of steganography
is uninteresting to you, you have to admit the idea of using
randomSeed to reliably reconstruct a "random" sequence of numbers is
of interest to a programmer. And imaging Lingo is just fun to play
with!
At 09:36 +0100 04/03/2002, Peter King wrote:
>Lets face it, the only people using Macs are designers, and thats
>because the rest of the design industry does so they have to.
Actually that's not entirely accurate. I use Linux at home because I
like the stability of the nix subsystem. When X was released I was
thrilled to at last have a UNIX running on a system that I also do my
programming on.
So while the hardware I use to do Director and other programming
projects is Mac, the subsystem is Darwin -- which is
Cupertino-flavored BSD. And while I do have some talent for visual
design it was my publisher's belief in my ability to write about and
teach programming that got me the deal, though perhaps my flippancy
helped too. (The book was of course written on a Mac -- an iBook, as
it happens.)
The *real* reason designers tend to lean toward Macs is because
that's what the hardware was engineered to do (along with the OS)
from the beginning. Complex images, a GUI, mice and so on were not
slapped in as afterthoughts ("Hey, look what they're doing... maybe
we should figure out how to do it too..."). This means the machines
have exceptional speed and stability when doing the kind of intensive
image manipulation that graphics designers and artists require. The
initial GUI concept was lifted from a prototype that Steve Jobs saw
at Xerox PARC in California, yes -- but the final GUI for MacOS 1 had
changed so much it wasn't the same thing at all any more.
Furthermore several designers I know who are actually quite good at
what they do aren't married to a platform. They can use Win, Mac or
nix as long as their *toolset* is present (generally the Adobe
suite). Your assessment about designers betrays ignorance of both
their craft and their intelligence.
Perhaps, too, you mistake elegance for lack of ability. Just because
a six-year-old can operate a Mac like a professional does not mean
the machines are for simple-minded dunces.
Finally, don't forget that until version 4 Director was a
Macintosh-only program. There were players for Windows, but all the
programming happened on Mac. I don't think you're going to try to
argue that Director itself was written by a bunch of know-nothing
bumpkin ignorami.
>So I ask you this... would you really take technical advice from a
>mac designer whose combined technical knowledge amounts to file
>formats, colour usage, corporate logos and a series of buzz words
>such as multimedia?
I wouldn't take tech advice from someone like that, no (of course if
it was a question dealing with translating color values from one file
format to another, hey...); but then you'd be unwise to ignore my
tech advice on the subject of DOS, Win16, Win32, BSD, Linux (I
started with Slackware but also hack Red Hat and Mandrake), XWindows
*or* Mac.
>Blame Howdy, it was his comments about PC users being stupid that
>kicked this whole thing off.
Actually I made sure to include little wry comments that implied I
wasn't all that serious. Perhaps instead of "stupid" I should have
implied that some PC users can be thin-skinned, unsubtle and
literal-minded.
To bring it back to Macromedia and Director: When o when will we have
a 'nix release of Director? I don't know about anyone else but I have
a serious hankering for the market that would open up.
For starters UNIX programming can be pretty arcane. Even the "easy"
means -- using script languages -- is difficult. Check out tcl
sometime. For nix it's almost C++ or nothing at all. Well, I'm not
sure it's defensible to require a person to have a degree in
engineering before you let him write software. I'd think even
die-hard Windows fanatics would agree with that; after all, Bill
Gates never finished college.
But more than that, UNIX is the planet's backbone. Desktop users,
immersed as we are in a world of little standalone units, are
generally unaware of what's happening on the other side of the net
cable -- but if you get a look back there all you see is UNIX.
The closest I have seen to a Directoresque language for nix is
Python, which is another one of those command-prompt languages
(initially). But it doesn't have the particular suite of graphic,
sound and time manipulation tools Director owns which makes it such a
distinctly usable critter. Director is really rather unique in that
sense -- invented *after* GUIs became widely available, it is one of
the few major programmer tools that doesn't more or less require you
to start with ASCII and project files in text format. It incorporates
the graphics from the start. I like that, and I think a lot of UNIX
programmers would like it too.
I honestly think there's a market for it (and have for years). I
suppose the main reason we haven't seen a port yet is that it would
be pretty damned tricky. I bring it up here because I like to tickle
the folks at wish-director from time to time on the subject and hope
others will want to stir the pot some too.
--
Warren Ockrassa | http://www.nightwares.com/
Director help | Free files | Sample chapters | Freelance | Consulting
Author | Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide
Published by Osborne/McGraw-Hill
http://www.osborne.com/indexes/beginners_guides.shtml
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