Director was originally meant for creating CD-ROM games. However, in the early 90's, it began finding a new home on the web. "Shockwave" was Macromedia's term which meant "compressed for the web." The first entry in the Shockwave line of products was Shockwave Director Player - so called because it could play Director Movies which had been compressed for the web. Because it was, at the time, the first and only product in the Shockwave line of products, Shockwave Director Player was often shortened to just "Shockwave."
Enter Flash. Again, Macromedia wanted Flash Movies to be able to be compressed so they could be downloaded quickly over the web - so they made the Shockwave Flash Player plugin, so called because it could play Flash Movies which had been compressed for the web. So there was Shockwave Director Player, to play compressed Director Movies, and Shockwave Flash Player, to play compressed Flash Movies.
The problem is, by this point, everyone already knew Shockwave Director Player as just "Shockwave." To those uninformed, it seemed that there was now both a Shockwave AND a Shockwave Flash. Shockwave Flash Player was more often referred to as just Flash, to avoid confusion with what was already being referred to as Shockwave.
So when we say Shockwave, we're referring to the first word in Shockwave Director Player, but when we say Flash, we're referring to the second word in Shockwave Flash Player...
Or at least, this was the case until Adobe acquired these names from Macromedia, at which point they just decided to rename the plugins to what they were being popularly referred to as. Now what was Shockwave Director Player is officially just called Shockwave, and what was Shockwave Flash Player is officially just called Flash. In order to further undo the confusion, SWF was changed to stand for Small Web Files instead of ShockWave Flash.
As for useless trivia, Director actually even predates it's main use of producing multimedia CD-ROMs. When it was still a MacroMind product, it was used for stuff like the "getting started" floppy disk for early Macs (the tutorial where you learned how to use a mouse by feeding fish and stuff)
http://www.action-packed.net/q-design/examples/Instructional...
Thank you.
In fact, I totally forgot about Lingo until just now. But it actually looks pretty cool:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingo_(programming_language)
I̶f̶ ̶m̶e̶m̶o̶r̶y̶ ̶s̶e̶r̶v̶e̶s̶ ̶m̶e̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶,̶ ̶I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶L̶i̶n̶g̶o̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶i̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶a̶ ̶b̶y̶t̶e̶c̶o̶d̶e̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶e̶r̶e̶a̶s̶ ̶I̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶A̶c̶t̶i̶o̶n̶S̶c̶r̶i̶p̶t̶ ̶w̶a̶s̶ ̶a̶l̶w̶a̶y̶s̶ ̶i̶n̶t̶e̶r̶p̶r̶e̶t̶e̶d̶.̶ ̶ ̶I̶ ̶m̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶w̶r̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶.̶
Flash won over Shockwave because Flash Studio was more popular with animators and game creators than Macromedia Director.
There's some online tools that will do it for you, e.g.:
It seems that if you change your user agent you can get the links.
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Shockwave 12.3.4.204 Windows Full Other Browsers
https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/download/?installer=Shockwav...
Shockwave 12.2.5.195 Full (OS X 10.6 and above)
https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/download/?installer=Shockwav...
Shockwave Player 10 for Mac PPC
https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/download/?installer=Shockwav...
You definitely want the Full version not Slim. The Slim version throws out some backwards compatibility stuff to decrease the filesize.
No clue how to find that link on official adobe.com website :/ I had to googlefu it just so my Mum can play some old majong games.
Note that plugins do not work in Microsoft Edge. It has to be Internet Explorer. Edge didn't replace IE, you can still find IE by searching for Internet Explorer in the Windows 10 start menu.
In theory the Applet sandbox works really well. It's an extremely secure environment that's been deployed widely in the most demanding conditions -- think banks and governments. In practice the Applet security model encountered the following problems:
(1) Users are really, really dumb. They are happy to grant escalated privileges to the some 3D farming game they stumbled upon on the internet. Users will literally click on anything you tell them to. [2]
(2) Getting users to upgrade Java was terribly difficult. This meant when a real security flaw was discovered it might hang around for years and years and years. There was no mechanism to force users to upgrade Java or to actively disable Java installations proven insecure.
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/deployment/applet/se...
[2] https://www.trustedsec.com/2013/04/java-7-update-21-applet-s...
Also the security sandbox of Javascript is one of the best, if not the best. So it cannot do anything it wants.
Online resources. So you cannot run them offline.
In my day job, I'm working on a CRM and sales system that is 100% web based and does work offline and is even offline-first (I love you Germany, but your mobile network sucks).
There may be many other problems with it but offline is mostly a solved problem in the web world.
"Offline" is no more solved "not hijacking scrolling", "linkable URLs" and "not re-inventing <a href> badly".
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/, https://www.google.com/, https://en.wikipedia.org, https://www.reddit.com/, https://www.nytimes.com
As I said before, it's a 5-minute thing to get started with service-workers. Web-sites can use that and then you don't even need to save. There is this great offline library, fellow developers! Use it! What other platform gives you such easy-to-use offline capabilities?
> "not hijacking scrolling", "linkable URLs" and "not re-inventing <a href> badly"
You are dealing with a Turing-complete language here. Navigation situation is still way better than the applets.
What is the alternative you are supporting instead the current situation?
I don't care if websites can use that if they don't.
> You are dealing with a Turing-complete language here.
That's the fucking problem.
> What is the alternative you are supporting instead the current situation?
Using a proper application platform instead of a pile of hacks on top of the web. Without that pile of hacks, the web would actually be usable because publishers would not be able to break the UX.
It's new, and you can still save pages. Browsers will do their best to include all resources they depend as well.
> Using a proper application platform instead
Which one? Is there any cross-platform one with consistent design and UX? I don't think so.
No, I can't. That does not work reliably.
> Browsers will do their best
In other words, they will fail.
> Which one? Is there any cross-platform one with consistent design and UX? I don't think so.
Frankly, even Electron applications are better than making web pages that behave incorrectly.
In all your given examples, it does.
> Frankly, even Electron applications are better than making web pages that behave incorrectly.
You know that 90% of Electron apps do not have any native function calls and are just wrappers on top of a web-app?
I just don't understand what you are criticizing anymore.
That does not make sense. If they made no native function calls, they could not even display a window.
There's one particular Shockwave game that I was recently able to recover from the depths of the Wayback Machine, which was a game from Disney for the Inspector Gadget movie; terrible film, but their website had this nifty little game that wasn't necessarily difficult but was addicting in that I wanted to see just how far I could go with it. For years I thought it was gone for good, and was glad to finally see it again after I lost it 15+ years ago.
Here it is in all its 1999 glory: https://web.archive.org/web/20031017000018/http://www.disney...
I always liked it in part because I don't think I've seen a similar game. It's kind of like if you took the random shapes part of Tetris and added a "jigsaw puzzle" element.