Adobe Director multimedia authoring software, which gained popularity during the CD-ROM era of the 90s, has released its first upgrade since Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005. 

The last significant upgrade for Director was in 2001, with the 8.5 version. Many developers began using Director at that time, as an introduction to 3D applications. While quite a few other 3D tools have hit the scene, many still find that Director is the most useful to them. 

Naresh Gupta, Senior Vice President, Print and Publishing at Adobe noted, "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. This milestone release provides a strong and flexible authoring environment that perfectly complements Adobe’s broad suite of authoring products, extending our customers’ creative reach to interactive 3D animations and games."

Historically, the Director application was utilized in the creation of the vast majority of educational CDROMs, due to its ease of use and extensive range of features, with both Apple and Microsoft operating systems.
 
The latest release was designed to include a flexible and easy-to-use authoring environment, thus enabling multimedia designers, animators and developers to create more comprehensive interactive applications, games, e-learning and other simulation based products. 
 
Rick Jones, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Director, explained at PC Magazine’s New York offices , "t’s not just for developers. It’s about 40 percent developers and 60 percent entry-level multimedia authoring."

Updated Feature Hightlights 

1. Director 11 and Shockwave support Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Mac PPC, Mac OS 10.4, and Mac OS 10.5. 

2. QuickTime 7, Windows Media and RealPlayer, support for Adobe’s own Flash CS3 and Unicode is designed to make the development of multi-lingual applications more straightforward.  

3. Either alone or with the Adobe Shockwave Player, Director 11 can be used for authoring once and publishing content for the web, CDs/DVDs and the desktop simultaneously. The environment is said to complement Adobe’s ecosystem of products, allowing for Adobe Flash SWF files to be used for Director projects, played in Director and Shockwave, and then edited with Adobe Flash CS3 Professional.