Well, I am on my way to San Francisco! Hoping that all of our DirectorWeb friends will write us some reports for those stuck at home!

More from the coffee bar later...

The Coveted Dir-Web T-shirt

The "only beer and wine" bar at the Monday night party.

The guy with the blenders at the Monday night party.

The caterers for the Monday night party.

Face painting at the Monday night party.

Flash Man makes an appearance at the Monday night party.

The Flash city limits sign hangs proudly over the Monday night party.

Some food at Monday night party.

Jon Gay, megabrains behind Flash, schmoozing at the Monday night party.

Kevin Ellis schmoozing at the Monday night party.

Palmreading at the Monday night party.

Someone pouring "Flash shots" at the Monday night party.

Sheri Kramer at the Monday night party.

A pile of sandwiched atop some wheatgrass at the Monday night party.

The theme seems to be marketing, marketing, marketing. Plus lots of Austin Powers.

Opening Keynote was Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess saying they were after a "symbiotic relationship with developers" plus more emphasis on consumers and enterprise. Last quarter download figures were 44 million "successful" downloads of shockwave player.

The big thing so far is the announcement of Shockwave.com the supercedent of Shockrave, as a entertainment oriented venue for shockwave/flash content.

The new Shockwave 7.0.2 plug-in features the Shockwave Remote "virtual device" a floating palette controller for Shockwave content. VCR buttons allow viewers to play, pause, rewind, fast forward. They can save locally up to 5 shockwave content pieces which can then be viewed offline. A button allows you to send a reference to a favorite game or animation to a friend via e-mail. A new search utility allows you to searh the web for shockwav content using LookSmart search engine. The Shockwave remote offers MP3 player like ability to recast the remote's appearance with different custom "skins". A Skin Development kit is already online.

The other thing new is a "shockmachine", a desktop projector/app for viewing, saving shockwave and flash content and viewing from a carosel like device from the dekstop. Ultimately this app will co$t 20$.

They are casting web entertainment as happening now, with streaming cartoons, new and retro games, animated greeting cards and more.

Look for lots of stuff later about Flash 4-- featuring scriptable variables and editable text.

Am session on Director 7.0.2 and shockwave.

Plugs for multi-user server features, demo of a "NetSketch" app live from Swedend (oops, where do that URL go?), a pictionary type game.

Werner Sharp overviewed the "expressive rendering" features of D7, essentialy the ability to rotate, skew, and distort cast memebrs that we've wished for over several versions Werner gave a plug for NoiseCrime's Quad car race game.

Glenn Ruehle reviewed the new text features, editable rich text in runtime, smaler file size for RTF members. In 7.0.2 there are more controls for deciding when/if text members are pre-rendered, either as the movie loads, before it apears on stage, or pre-rendering first to bitmaps. Hypertext can be rotated, distorted and still work.

Ely Greenfield showed streaming QuickTime 4 in shockwave, for static movies as well as new QT4 streaming live video. MP3 can now be streamed as well and functions like SWA.

Big will be more Flash 4 features in Director as shown by Traci Stampfli.. in fact, the support is built into 7.0.2 even before Flash 4 is released! Director can now send and receive messages to Flash content via getVariable and setVariable lingo calls (Flash 4 will have its own environment for variables). Also, Director and Flash can send and recieve text content and update text fields between each other. Also, Dir 7.0.2 can mix Flash and Director audio on Windows.

Joe Dunn then gave more of the marketing overview for Shockwave.com- a desire to be a "pioneer in online entertainment" citing that shockrave content doubled between November 1998 and March 1999. Partnerships are in palce with @home, comcast, Xoom, LookSmart. ZDNet, Warner, and Showtime. Shockrave.com is now in limited beta, with a June public beta and expects to be online with e-commerce by december

The features of Shockwave remote are customizable as Movie options; when dcr content is saved and played it displays copyright information as well as link backs to the author. They have engineered the task of packaging complex content (multiple movies, external media" via "bookkeeping", content "scanning" and explicit author declaration via XML.

The Shockwave Remote skin system includes 22 files, GIFs for custom button states, an image map for the controller, and custom sound files.

Look for support info for developers at http://www.shockwave.com/devroom/

Prepping machines for the D7 Inside Scoop session.

Prepping machines for the D7 Inside Scoop session.

Lalit Balchandani taking notes at the D7 Inside Scoop session.

Sarah Allen screening internet questions at the D7 Inside Scoop session.

Werner Sharp fielding a question at the D7 Inside Scoop session.

Mike Seery and Flash Man.

A bunch of iMacs in the Dev Zone.

Entrance to Moscone

Pat Mclellan shows a precious DOUG bowling ticket

ucon99 totchkes

Director Team on stage

The Amazing Zav!

Direct-L Gathering 8 hour session

Stehen Comeau and Buzz Kettles at the Monday nite party

"Through the Eyes of Visionaries: A State of the Industry Report"- a Learnig session

Bryna Chapman played Richard Dawson for "Interactive Feud", as a front end for presenting feedback for a panel of training and Instructional design experts he e-mail surveyed.

In response to his question, "What are the biggest problems in online learning?" were:

1. Poor design
2. Too much focus on Technology
3. Lack of Mass-Market Content
4. Lack of Standards
5. Limiting Technology (bandwidth)
6. Not enough time to to everything
7. Ignoring the web's potential for communication
8. Expectations vs. Percieved values
9. One size fits all solutions

Advanced Lingo and Director (Dana Nuon, Zac Belado, Andrew White)

Zac did a general overview of suggestions for general project development. Without the network connectin in the room, he had no slides. "Do not hardcode anything" said Zac and he presented a case for re-usbale project templates.

Dana Nuon reviewed the concepts of "streams" or abstractions of data flows for projects, "the plumbing system for a project". Programing streams, according to Dana, always have a 'source' and a 'sink' (inouts and outputs), are accomplished through a 'public interface' where all methods have read and write methods.

Why use it? "Java made me do it"

Andy White reviewed concepts and exmaples of handling network operations through OOP methods. I thinmk he lost the crowd, but you can see his demos and notes at http://www.cathode.co.uk/ucon99/

Virtually the same picture as Alan's of the "Director List Community" Gathering.

Mike Edmunds at the "Director List Community" Gathering.

Everyone watching Mike Edmunds at the "Director List Community" Gathering.