#macromedia — Public Fediverse posts

ohhh this is just fascinating. it turns out that A Fool's Errand (a very eclectic tarot-themed puzzle game for the mac) by cliff johnson got a sequel 25 years later, called A Fool and His Money.

the sequel was built in Adobe (Macromedia) Director (!) of all things, and required a serial number/key file after 90 days, which you could only buy by emailing cliff and receiving a zipped keyfile

cliff stopped selling the game a few years later, and it completely disappeared.

out of pure frustration, Renzo Pigliacampo decompiled the compiled Director projector, and reassembled a working Director project out of it.

he does a great job of explaining the process of writing a keygen for a 10+ year old game here. it warms my heart to see Lingo code again after decades 😻

https://renzopigliacampo.medium.com/the-fool-and-his-money-making-a-keygen-for-a-commercial-shockwave-game-eb6daf135b8b

#programming #macromedia #macintosh

Mes débuts en programmation c'était avec Flash (avant ça le basic sur TI83+ mais ça compte pas vraiment). C'était un outil puissant et très naturel d'approcher la programmation, et je regrette que cette approche n'existe plus vraiment aujourd'hui.

Il y avait un canvas, sur lequel on pouvait dessiner en vectoriel. Il y avait des calques, des objets, et une timeline. On pouvait définir des paramètres (position, rotation, taille, couleurs, etc) et les animer entre deux keyframes.

Mais surtout, chaque objet (appelé "clip") avait un nom, qu'on pouvait utiliser directement dans des scripts. On pouvait facilement modifier les mêmes paramètres qu'avec l'interface graphique, mais on avait tous les contrôles logiques d'un langage classique : boucles, conditions, fonctions, événements, et j'en passe.

Au fond, on peut faire la même chose en HTML+JS aujourd'hui (d'ailleurs le langage de Flash, l'Actionscript, était basé sur l'ECMAScript), mais ce qui m'a permis de m'intéresser à la programmation c'était ce logiciel, qui alliait savamment design et programmation, permettant de faire des applications fonctionnelles, jolies et interactives rapidement.

Ma fille veut faire des jeux avec moi, et j'aurais vraiment aimé retrouver un logiciel qui mélange Inkscape, JS, et after effects (pour la timeline, Adobe à la poubelle nonobstant). Si ça existe pas ça va devenir mon nouveau projet non-fini, c'est terrible.

#Macromedia #Flash

Let’s say the last animation tool I used was #Macromedia Flash, and I’ve been out of the game for 20 years. What’s the modern equivalent I should be looking into in 2026?

A screenshot I took while working on a project in Macromedia ColdFusion Studio 5 around 25 years ago.

#webdev

#Macromedia #Allaire #Adobe #ColdFusion #CF #scriptinglanguage #screenshot #Windows #nostalgia #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing #old #SQL #developers #Oracle #CommonSpot #webdevelopment

it's hard to imagine that back in the mid-90s, the stiff and strait-laced MS had an entire department for making kids multimedia

their edutainment department was mostly independent of the rest of the monster, and produced some really unique educational software. Dinosaurs is one of their best - the combination of high production value, solid paleontological detail, and skeumorphic interfaces makes for a totally memorable experience.

i found this non-interactive demo buried in the program. i heard one of the former MS developers mention recently that scenes like these were built in Macromedia Director, and then nested within the program (built in C/C++) using a Director runtime.

you might notice the weird random b+w noise around the window, and in some of the background. that's a byproduct of the team using indexed palettes to handle the hundreds of compressed images. every single image was run through DeBabelizer to extract its index, and then averaged with other images to find shared colour palettes from 256 colours. the team had to make sure that the colour palette chosen never intruded into the "safe palette" used by the window frame, titlebar, and background. obviously, this one paletting error snuck past QA.

#dinosaurs #multimedia #cdrom #win31 #win95 #macromedia

happy to discover this short talk by John Henry Thompson - the creator of the Lingo scripting language for Macromedia Director. JHT talks about the history of the language, from its inception through its various versions.

it was one of my first OOP experiences as a kid, and left a huge impression in how i understood user-centred programming. love learning that it was deeply influenced by Smalltalk

https://youtu.be/DvS4h-1Eyu4?t=161

#macromedia #programming #multimedia

... peep ... Animated with Flash in 2003, remastered in 2026. Challenged myself to painting a background in Photoshop which took forever. #peeps #marshmallowpeeps #noai #flash #kranioclast #drmangor #mangor #photoshoppainting #handdrawn #macromedia #hadit #traditionalanimation #animate #darkhumor

I have a bunch of really pedagogically useful animation on a CD but they are... trapped in Macromedia Flash. They are (kinda) still available via a new publisher, but only if you buy their textbook and then it is an annual subscription. I purchased this CD years ago, loved the animations, and miss being able to show them in class. This seems like a place where I might be able to hire someone to port it? I'm quite unskilled with coding. #plannedobsolescence #software #macromedia #flash #help

@davebauerart @Dreamwieber

#HyperCard and its programming language #HyperTalk (inspired by #Smalltalk) spread widely into several authoring tools of the early web, like #Macromedia #Director and later #Flash.

There was also a Windows clone #MetaCard that lives on till today under the name #LiveCode (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveCode). Sadly it didn’t stick to it’s simplicity. It’s now bloatware, not usable for me.

Some people name the language #Delphi as a successor, but I’ve never tried it.

the overwhelming amount of powerless, dispirited and pessimistic grumbling on masto about today's technology is a daily reminder that people are equally capable of creating very beautiful, aspirational things using creative tools.

this is a 5 minute recording of Ceremony of Innocence, by peter gabriel's Real World Multimedia. you may recognize the style, because it's a playful re-imagining of Nick Bantock's Griffin & Sabine epistolary novel.

if you recognize the voiceovers, it's because they're by Isabella Rossellini, Ben Kingsley and Paul McGann.

it was built with macromedia director 30 years ago. this recording was done on a 2004 iMac G5.

we're equally capable of building beautiful things like this now.

where the danger lies, also the saving power grows

#multimedia #macromedia #retrogaming #hopepunk #macintosh #vintageApple

Last of the Frogmen- made with Flash in 2008, 4k remastered in 2026. #lastofthefrogmen #adobeanimate #flash #kranioclast #drmangor #mangor #redneck #vector #animation #handdrawn #cryptid #frogman #frogmen #noai #macromedia #traditionalanimation #animate #darkhumor #darkart #motorcycle

tldr: video tour of a multimedia Enhanced CD that no one has seen in 30 years.

anyone under 40 has probably never heard of enhanced cd's. they were a *very* short lived phenomena of the 90s: a Blue Book audio disc that has both redbook audio (music) tracks *and* a data track with multimedia content.

they were expensive to produce. every enhanced CD that i've personally seen was a Macromedia Director projector, usually in both Mac & Windows formats. since the data portion usually took up a significant chunk of space, this also meant sacrificing a music track or two.

but as a teenager, there was nothing cooler to me than being able to stick my cd in a discman to listen to music, and then stick the same cd in my doublespeed CD-ROM drive and goof around with multimedia content.

the best CD I owned was by a canadian band: I Mother Earth. and like almost all great canadian bands, we selfished refused to export them in the 90s and kept them all for ourselves. so no one really knew about their enhanced CD

I Mother Earth had one chart topping album in canada - Scenery and Fish.

a few years ago i ripped the windows and mac versions of the data track from my original teenaged copy of the disc and uploaded them to IA:
https://archive.org/details/ime-scenery-fish-ecd

#canada #music #multimedia #macromedia #macintosh #vintageApple

til: the title sequences for Trainspotting were built in macromedia director and a fax machine

some great typography and graphic design discussion in this interview

https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/trainspotting/

#macromedia #graphicDesign #typography

one project that comes to mind is @raphkoster's criminally underappreciated Metaplace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaplace

it was a little like being able to build your own 2d graphical MOO/MUD, but strongly bent towards the web. it had a scripting language and a flash-based graphical editor. i wish there was more info out there about it.

#moo #mud #smallWeb #macromedia

People seem to be pretty pissed off about Adobe these days. I get that. But the seeds were sown 20 years ago when Adobe was allowed to buy Macromedia in 2005.

Macromedia FreeHand was a serious competitor for Illustrator and Macromedia Fireworks for Photoshop. I liked both products and they meant at least there would be a duopoly.

Yet the corrupt neoliberal politicians didn't stop the sale from going through because it would be an intervention on so called free market.

#Adobe #Macromedia

Es ist gekommen, wie es kommen musste:
#Affinity wird zu dem gleichen Erpresser-Model wie alle anderen.

War ja damals z.B. Bei #Macromedia #FreeHand auch so.

Firmen, die nur dem Geld folgen sind seelenlos. Sie agieren niemals im Sinne der Nutzer, sondern folgen immer der sinnlosen Geld-Vermehrung.

Wir denken ernsthaft über den Wechsel zu #Inkscape, #Gimp, #Scribus, #Krita, #Blender etc. nach.

Mit dem Umstieg zur #Nextcloud haben wir ja auch gute Erfahrungen gemacht.

sometimes the internet fails to preserve culturally important works of high art like this Highlander: The Series multimedia CD-ROM experience

i've done my part in rescuing this disc from oblivion today. 🙏

here it is playing back on my iMac G5. sorry about the background noise. the disc had to spin at 52x because there was so much power inside it

enjoy this mac OS X/win95 hybrid cd-rom here:

https://archive.org/details/highlander_s3_cd-rom

#macromedia #flash #highlander #digiPres

someone local to me is selling 850 copies of a Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie (a long defunct comedy group) multimedia CD-ROM disc. it appears to be a Flash-based video cd.

sadly, it hasn't been archived anywhere, and the seller will *only* sell all 850 of them 😆

#canada #macromedia

followup to that homer3d story in wired:

i managed to extract one partially-working flash SWF from cyberworld.imax.com. here it is, rendered with ruffle

it's wonderfully 2000s cyberdrivel. i only wish we had the entire site archived. 😅

#macromedia #digiPres

buried in an april 2000 issue of wired mag: cyberworld.imax.com was a flash site that demo’d homer^3 and antz characters.

sadly lost to time as wbm did not properly archive the swf

#flash #macromedia #simpsons #2000s

Every year to the day, 12am Sydney Australian time (AEST), I receive this email. For the past two decades.

Flashkit was my first real online community.

The folks there took time to guide and teach. Not just in Macromedia Flash, but in life! I was an awkward kid. I didn't know how to human. It was trial by error and the adults were so understanding, and so kind in guiding me.

It's a nice reminder of what a community can do. I pretty much dropped into this forum of adult professionals as a teen with a weird tech hyper focus, and they rolled with it!

Every year I get this email, I'm reminded of the joy the Internet can be.

#macromediaflash #macromedia #adobeflash

today's buried treasure:

an interview with john henry thompson on the history of Macromedia Director. it's one of the only interviews ever recorded on the subject.

as the lead programmer and creator of Lingo - the OO scripting language used in director - he relates intimate knowledge of its origins. i was delighted to learn that he borrowed much of the grammar from Hypertalk!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqISbaJ7qug

#macintosh #vintageApple #macromedia #softwarePreservation #programming