Wow, I have had a fairly amazing response to Part 1 of this post, and while putting part 2 together I have realize there is enough for a Part 3 as well. Anyway, here goes…

Nothing that exciting about this one – just a bunch of speaker badges from that era, although I have just noticed that they spelled my name incorrectly for the FlashKit one :-(

Its funny… most speakers I know collect their speaker badges, with the lanyards, and hang them in a huge group over a door knob or something. I do it too. I am not sure why… maybe showing off?

I do know that looking through them brings back a lot of memories about the conferences, the travel and the great people you meet.

Well, now onto something really interesting – Macromedia Marketing. Macromedia was famed for their very cool marketing ‘give aways’. Remember that these were the people that came up with the term ‘sticky’ for interactive Shockwave website as it was hard to pull yourself away from them. They later replaced this with ‘magnetic’ to describe Flash interactive sites as they drew you back to them.

So Macromedia Marketing made life as a presenter a dream – if something went wrong technically during a presentation you could always turn to the latest in macromedia giveaways to fill the gap.

Lets start with ‘Flash Balls’! There are 2 of them in this picture even though they are now very old and discolored, Flash balls had the Flash logo inside and would flash when you bounced them. I don’t know how many we gave away over the years but people would fight over them during a show, and sometimes get hit in the back of the head with them while watching the previous one go sailing over their heads.

Also pictured here are mice, bubble pens, calculators, pocket knives, badges, card holders, modem cables and the UltraDev Stopwatch – because developing with UltraDev was SO fast! I just looked on another shelf and saw coffee mugs, travel mugs, a sushi dish and the Fireworks water bottle… ahh those marketing guys crack me up ;-)

Other items not pictured here include the Macromedia Scooter – it is in the garage and I was too lazy to get it out and take a photo. Also the Dreamweaver Tarrot Cards (funny story over a beer here), The Sitespring Slinky, The Macromedia Kite, and innumerable t-shirts (Greg Rewis and I started to use these as our ‘software wireless network enhancers’ – long story… but suffice it to say that the ‘hardware wireless network enhancer’ was a dustbuster).

I am sure I have missed a bunch here and I am sure that anyone reading this will have a huge list of their own – if you do, then please add a comment!

Wow, how many of you remember MacroMind MediaMaker? MacroMind or more properly MacroMind-Paracomp was Macromedia pre 1992. MediaMaker wasn’t the first MacroMind product that I started to use – my first MacroMind product was VideoWorks in 1986 when I was teaching media studies. VideoWorks was the pre-cursor to Director renamed from VideoWorks II around 1987. In those days it was just an animation package – think Future Splash Animator. I used it in the classroom to teach animation and was very excited when finally we took delivery of Director 3 – see the box below – and installed all 48 floppy disks on the few Apple computers we had in the classroom. Admittedly the application didn’t take up all the 48 disks – some of them contained sample files including a stick figure walking.

Here I am going to take a stand Serge (in reference to your post which sparked this). You said in your post that before Flash the only movement on the web was very simple ‘blink’ tags and animated gifs.

What about the groundbreaking days of Director Shockwave? Long before Flash was a happening thing, the entire Interactive industry was born with Director.

Ok, there were a couple of other also-rans like HyperCard from Apple and mFactory from mTropolis, but neither of these had the influence that Shockwave had and neither had realistic web solutions.

If you want to open a can of worms with age old ‘multimedia’ developers coming out of the woodwork, mention Director, Lingo, Xtras, Direct_L and Shockwave!

Here I am going to mention a legend of the interactive world and a very familiar name to anyone who was in the industry at this time - John Dowdell. It was about this time that I became aware of John – he didn’t work for Macromedia at the time, but he was the most active person on all of the Director lists. John later was employed by Macromedia to continue his work on the lists and I met him first in Sydney a year or 2 later. I was starstruck! I then met him a few times in San Francisco at the Macromedia offices after I left teaching and joined Macromedia. John is now with Adobe and I drop by his desk whenever I am in San Francisco, I follow his tweets and read his calm and well weighted responses to users (and internal staff’s) questions and concerns.

John, if there is an appropriate Hall of Fame – you have my vote and I am proud to call you a mate!

Well, this again is a blast from the past. I started to use FutureSplash Animator in 1996 although to be fair I only created a couple of simple animations for my company website ‘Multimedia Art Design’ or ‘mad’. Up til then everything I had created in the way of multimedia had been done with Director (with a little testing on the side with Hypercard and mTropolis). The following year Macromedia bought FutureSplash and released it as Macromedia Flash. Working with Flash was a breath of fresh air for animation and file size for the web, but was initially a little frustrating when you had come from Director.

Well Flash 2.0 was a huge version for me… I presented the launch of Flash 2.0 around Asia Pacific and in Sydney I had the Flash Product Manager at the time – Eric Whitman introduce me. In the next post there will be a picture of a bunch of us from Macromedia from the conference in Sydney climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and yes, Eric is there, as well as a number of other familiar faces. I hadn’t seen Eric for years and we caught up again a few months ago at MAX in LA. The conference where we launched Flash 2.0 was the Asia Pacific UCON and I can remember playing Eric and others at pool, climbing the bridge, beers and jokes on top of a pub after the climb, and something about a Japanese restaurant running out of sake after a team dinner.

Tags: Director, Flash, FlashKit, FutureSplash, Macromedia, MacroMind, MediaMaker, UCON

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 6:51 am and is filed under Flash. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.