Director  

Miss Director

The last copy of Director I upgraded to was MX 2004 (aka "Director 10"). I haven't had any Director projects since I was laid off from Reality Engineering nearly three years ago, and the only Director-related project I've had was a prototype for an online (Flash) update of a 1994 Director product. MX 2004 wasn't much use there; I had to switch into Classic OS 9 mode and run Director 6 just to open the DIR files. My role in that project came to an end in February 2008. Upgrading hasn't exactly been a priority.

I've always loved using Director for utilities, though. I've built any number of quick-and-dirty text processing tools for myself over the years, including a web log processor for my first server back fifteen years ago. I've used it to batch process images from time to time since Director 8. I've even just used the JavaScript engine to test functions and processes I put into web pages.

Most recently, as I've been working on a poker-related iPhone app, I wrote a poker hand evaluator in Lingo that I used to generate statistics on 500,000 hands for 2-12 players and output the results out as an XML file. Even my old dual 1GHz G4 desktop computer can evaluate 1,000 12-handed hands of poker in less than 4 seconds. You'd think that a faster processor, say one of them Intel thingies, really push through the numbers. My 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo laptop runs Apple's Snow Leopard OS 10.6, however, and Director MX 2004 won't run on it. I still do a lot of my work on my desktop (what with the never having to leave the house for work) but it's irritating not to be able to whip up something in Director when I want to.

I'm trying Parallels out to run Windows on the laptop, maybe I'll see about setting up my Windows copy of Director there.