Shockwave Breaches Security in a Big Way. Adobe Breaches Etiquette in an even bigger way

Slashdot just reported that the Macromedia Adobe Director Shockwave Player may have security holes affecting millions of systems. Not the popular Flash plugin, but the evil twin that disappeared into the shadows years ago.

This is particularly saddening for a proud former Director and Shockwave developer. If you have the shockwave player installed, just go ahead and dump it.

I cringe as I say that, know that within the last several months, dozens of really smart people people I have known through the Direct-L and have been helped by countless times over the years are dropping like flies, and finding other platforms for multimedia development in an increasingly hyper-connected online world.

Back in the day, way before the Internet, before everyone had a modem, there was multimedia. We’re talking the days of floppy disk mailers and DeBabelizer, LivePicture and hypercard. Learning how to compress graphics for a whole interactive experience in under 800k or 1.4mb. A floppy, then a mini CD, then a CD, then a DVD. Making the most engaging theatrics fit on tiny media was only one end of the spectrum. For years, Director was the de-facto coolest way to build intensely immersive, room-filling, museum quality experiences. With Director you can used to be able to connect monitors for gallery shows and museums and plug in lights and control cameras. As amazing as the best Flash websites are, they pale in comparison to the insane stuff we were doing 5 to 10 years ago with installations, fullscreen video, and the first 3D animation software as it essentially became available to the masses. I remember trying out CoSA AfterEffects 1.0. I beta-tested PhotoShop 1.0. I was already cutting rubylith with an exacto and couldn’t wait for Illustrator 88 to come out. I made some of the best posters with LivePicture, painter, Expression and Kai’s Power Tools.

Anyway, I digress. Reading the Direct-L lately has really sucked. I’ve been debating dropping the subscription for quite a while now, but I somehow enjoy remeniscing as various people describe tasks in Director. Lingo has a quiet elegance to it. It was fun while it lasted.

I’ll break it down for you. Adobe acquired Director (and Flash and Freehand and Fireworks and some other goodies like ColdFusion server) when they bought Macromedia. Since they had their own tools like Illustrator (bye-bye Freehand) and Photoshop (cya Fireworks), Flash’s smaller runtime and fast vector routines made it ultimately the next cool way to, again, make graphics and stuff smaller (remember the floppy disk mailers?), thereby sealing Director’s fate, since it was more meant for making big projects with pristine media quality for CDs and DVDs, multimedia projects that are just much too big for our slow 24kbps dialup.

Here’s the painful irony: Now that the web and internet speeds are catching up to delivering amazing quality HD theater experience we once dreamed of, Adobe has let Director languish for so many years that it barely works, and the best and most evangelistic Director gurus have abandonded it in favor of other tools (particularly for online realtime 3D, really the only reason to still play with Shockwave) that are either supported by their makers or open source.

I really feel for anyone who continued to put their faith in Director and Shockwave over the past few years as Adobe gave you the shaft. It really stings and kills your confidence and enthusiasm for your craft when the tool maker decides to stop making the tool.

Adobe, you have not only breached security and etiquette, you have alienated some of your biggest fans and most ardent supporters.

Speaking of which, I just shelled out nearly a grand for my Adobe Master Collection CS4 upgrade for Mac and when I entered my Adobe Master Collection CS3 Windows Serial Number activation said it was invalid. Thank you, Adobe, for squashing some really cool programs and for my $949 30-day trial.

I think I’m going to download Gimp and use Aviary from now on.

One final note. If you’re not angry at Adobe, maybe you could be angry at Aptana, as some other smart people I know are, for their recent move to stop supporting their PHP plugin. These software companies are really starting to tick me off. But you really can’t blame Aptana for moving (albeit silently) to become the best Rails IDE, it’s a pretty smart move for the small open-source software provider. At least you Aptana users didn’t spend the last 10 years shelling out thousands of dollars to Aptana for your free web development IDE.

Update 2009/11/03: Adobe has released some security fixes. So maybe, if you still use Adobe Director and Shockwave, try the Shockwave Player version 11.5.2.602 update.