Oscar Trelles

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been entertaining the idea of buying Director MX 2004, looking forward to expand my business availability to more advanced CD-ROM and DVD-ROM productions. However, as great as the improvements made to Director may sound, $1.3k is still a big chunk to swallow, at least for people like me, whose experience with Director is limited, and know nothing much about Lingo.

I’ve been trying to find detailed information about what’s coming with Director MX 2004, but every article over at Macromedia.com, including Miriam Geller’s feature in the EDGE, are a little too rhetorical. I mean, I’m excited about the added support for Javascript, for example, but I’d like know more about how it is being implemented. I’m pretty sure some tutorials will be available by the time Director is launched, but I wanted to get a T-shirt too!

So far, I have managed to craft all my client’s CD-ROM productions using only Flash. Sometimes we needed some creative programming to find our way around every project requirements, special requests, etc.

Anyway, I wanted to know if any Director users that are also Flash users (or viceversa?) would care to share their thoughts.

If you haven’t read Geoff’s post already (thanks for the compliments mate), the ‘looks’ of this blog have changed as of last night. However, this is not just a face-lift, I’m changing the architecture of the site as well, as I feel like proposing an alternative to the “3 columns” blog template.

I’ve been blogging for more than a year now, and reading blogs for a lot longer. During this time of being an author and reader, I’ve come to believe that the ‘traditional’ blog architecture we have been following is not the best solution anymore. The analysis of my site’s statistics has shed some light on this matter too, confirming that the way we read blogs (or at least this one), claims for an interface overhaul.

The results of all that ranting is what you see here now. It is still a work in progress, as I’m trying to optimize things in the back-end too.

If you run a Flash blog, or a technical blog for that matter, most probably the greater part of your traffic comes through blog aggregators. If that is so, and depending on your feed’s configuration, those links direct users to a document containing an entire story or article. Your index page is no longer your own gateway, and it’s only used by those who visit your site regularly (i.e. they have it bookmarked); so, why do you want to put there a list of 10+ posts they might have already read? unless you write 5+ posts a day, you don’t want to do that, and I certainly do not

Now, my blog index focuses on the very last post, and offers access to other recent posts. The difference is that you can read an extract of the post, rather than have only a link to it. And so on…

There are many details around, you will find by yourself. Please, feel free to express your opinion, or let me know if something is not working properly. Your feedback is most welcome, as always.