One of the biggest complaints about the Web is that the slickness of the content lags far behind that of other new media. CD-ROMs can use all kinds of nifty animation, sound, and even digital video. Director from Macromedia has long been one of the most popular content creation tools for CD-ROMs and other interactive media. Shockwave is Macromedia’s system for converting projects made with Director into a format that can be used on the Web. This opens up whole new worlds for Web developers, as Director allows far more sophisticated production than does plain old HTML.
January 30, 1997
Since the introduction of Shockwave, the Web has come alive with interactive games, multimedia, animation and all kinds of goodies. Shockwave! By Darrel Plant, is a comprehensive book about this exciting technology.
This book is not about Director per se, but concentrates on how to use previously-created Director "movies" with Shockwave. To make Director movies Web-ready, you "burn" them with a component called Afterburner. The burned object is simply inserted into a Web page. The basic concept is simple, but the Web has its own challenges, and this book covers them well.
Chapters include:
How the Web Works
Into the Shockwave
Preparing Graphics for Shockwave
Asynchronous Text
Other Asynchronous Operations
The Sounds of Shockwave
Shockwave Tricks.
There is also a Gallery of 9 sample Shockwave projects, each of which is discussed in detail, with descriptions of the various problems encountered and overcome in the course of each project.
The book comes with a CD-ROM which contains:
The Shockwave plugin (which can also be downloaded free from Macromedia)
A Shockwave tutorial
The 9 movies from the Gallery, including the source code.
