Adobe Director 11 is a media generation product that allows users to build applications using a movie metaphor where the user is the director of the movie. It is a popular choice for creating CD-ROMs and stand-alone kiosks, and it supports both 2D and 3D media. Using Adobe Director 11 along with the Adobe Shockwave Player, you can create and publish interactive games, demos, prototypes, simulations, and eLearning courses for the Web.

What do you need to run Adobe Director 11? On Windows you need an Intel Pentium 4 600 MHz or higher, Windows XP SP2 or Vista, 512MB RAM, 500MB hard drive space; on a Mac, Mac OS X v10.4, 512MB RAM, 500MB hard drive space and DVD-ROM drive (full detailed specs for both Authoring and Playback available here).

Adobe Director started out as MacroMind's VideoWorks in 1985 as an application for the original Macintosh. It became Director 1.0 in 1988. In 1992, MacroMind-Paracomp merged with Authorware to form Macromedia. In April of 2005, Adobe acquired Macromedia and in March of 2008 this, the first Adobe branded version of Director, was released.

The Adobe Director interface is designed around the movie metaphor. That is, each project that you create can be thought of as a movie with a cast of characters. In this environment you have a Stage where everything on screen takes place and a Score which not only handles the soundtrack, but also handles where the placement of the Cast are located as well as describing the action. And then there is you, the Director.

As the Director, you add the Cast; this comprises all of your media elements. You then place them on the Stage as sprites; these are simply the copy of the Cast members that appear upon the stage. You then refine the actions of the sprites by editing them on the Stage, or within the Score.

Director has been used for such widely divergent systems as the delivery of accelerated 3D entertainment for fast action games and virtual products. The creation of interactive 3D eLearning applications and the creation of high impact features at theme parks, museums, and visitor attractions.

So what is new with Adobe Director 11?

• DirectX 9 Driver – now used for rendering 3D graphics. Support for DirectX 9 enables the availability of Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) performance on a variety of video cards and provides a platform for further 3D enhancements in future releases.