I'd love it, personally, but that's because I'm a 'nix fan at heart and
have been since I first installed Slackware on an ancient 486/33 with 8
MB back in the mid 90s. (That was a fun system -- it triple booted:
Win3.11/DOS6, OS/2 Warp, Slackware. And the installation took *forever*
since everything came in from hand-fed floppies... I had to upgrade it
to 16 MB to get OS/2 to work reasonably well on it, though.)
I'd think personally that it would be a real good move for Macromedia to
get a foot in the 'nix door before Adobe :)
Yes, it might help them sidestep another potentially messy lawsuit at least. ;)
And given that the OS X is as
based around a 'nix core, I would imagine that it would now be easier than
before to start looking at that avenue of porting the applications?
Probably not. It would probably be about as tricky as porting from Win to Mac or vice versa. A lot of what goes on with OSX in the GUI level is quite disparate from what happens on UNIX; the OSX GUI is not an xWindows build. Apple has released a freeware X11 server but it's in beta; there's a third-party X11 server out there someplace too. The ports seem to work. But the point is that in order to get Director to run on a 'nix GUI it would have to be converted to run under xWindows, and that might be a major reason why Macromedia hasn't done it. It would be pretty costly.
However, there's not as much preventing them from creating a *player* that would run on 'nix. That would be like the pre-4 days, when you could make a runtime-only exe for Windows from the Mac side (before version 4 Director was Mac-only for authoring). Since many of the lower level routines for handling the *filesystem* on OSX are already in place, and since adapting those from the BSDish Darwin to a wider Linux distro would probably be a lot more feasible than doing an X11 port, it would make a lot of sense to allow us to create *projectors* that work on X11, even if the author environment isn't ported right away.
Warren Ockrassa | [EMAIL PROTECTED] Publisher, nightwares eBooks A division of | http://www.nightwares.com/ebooks/ nightwares LLC | http://www.nightwares.com/
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