The new version of Director is available for pre-order. A few years ago I’d have been ever-so-slightly excited at the prospect of a new version of what was once my favourite application, but really, who the hell in their right mind would burn $1,000 on this pointless application?

The CD-Rom is dead, the Shockwave plug-in is redundant, and, unbelievably, there’s still no Intel Mac version available.

Oh well… it was good while it lasted.

Adobe have revealed that a new version of Director will be released in the first half of 2007. No new features have been confirmed, which suggests that the emphasis will be on bug fixing and platform compatibility.

It’s great to hear that Adobe have finally made a commitment to one of Macromedia’s most long-standing products. Director has been been overshadowed by Flash in recent years, but the application still has a number of uses, and it remains the most powerful solution for CD-ROM development and web-based 3D.

On that note, I’d like to see the Shockwave 3D engine updated: it hasn’t really changed at all since its launch around 5-6 years ago. Shockwave 3D is still arguably the best cross-platform solution for delivering interactive 3D content and games on the web, but if Adobe don’t update the feature set it’s likely to fall in popularity, particularly amongst the all-important development community.

Director stalwart and all-round Macromedia legend Tom Higgins gives more information on Director’s future in his interview at Digital Media Designer, confirming that the next release will offer native support for Intel Mac’s and Windows Vista.

MDM have released an update to Zinc adding support for Flash 9, Flex 2 and AS3, with the added bonus of Universal Binary support for Intel-based Macs. (Mac OSX support is via a plugin - the application runs on Windows and generates Mac binaries).

I haven’t looked at Zinc in some time, and I’m genuinely impressed with the feature set it now boasts. In particular, the appearance of database connectivity is a real boon: if it can accommodate large databases (for data-driven CD-ROMs) and the SQL support is comprehensive, then I’ll find it hard to justify using Director with the Valentina Xtra again any time soon.