Pricing / entry cost for this tool

[Judy Perry]

Dan sez...

> I would have agreed until the last two revs. I am not personally
> acquainted with the situation, but several friends of mine who teach
> and study multimedia development at our local university have
> complained bitterly to me in the past year about how MM has made
> development in Flash all but inaccessible to folks who don't grok
> scripting. I'm not sure how they've managed to do this -- or if it's
> just a perception -- but it's hurt them in this university curriculum.

Chipp & Dan,

FWIW, I concur. IDT (Instructional Design & Technology) degree programs,
from what I know, have relied heavily on MM programs (first Director, then
increasingly Flash on presumption of Director's imploding doom).

>From what I have read and observed, many of these programs initially used
Hypercard but shifted to Director & Flash to accomodate PC-using students
(ultimately the clear majority).

Long before I obtained such a degree, I recall reading discussions
(largely from the HC list) and initiated some private ones on the subject,
and they all supported what you have said, namely, that when Hypercard
was the authoring software used, these individuals in the degree programs
were able to learn it suffficiently to continue using it beyond the
requirements of their degree program (that is to say, voluntarily).

However, I have yet to meet a single individual who has done likewise with
Director or Flash.  Not one.  Including me.  The learning curve for those
two products is markedly steeper: take a look at your 'average' _Director
for Dummies_ sort of book and you'll see how the 'inventive user' is
catastrophically-adrift in a sea of C-like dot syntax that goes on forever
and is incomprehensible (add to that the, until previously, foreign
concept of a timeline-based interface for this audience); Flash's
ActionScript (or whatever it's called these days) isn't a whole lot
different, being based, I think, heavily on JavaScript meant to look more
like a Java/C-lite than a 'real' x-Talk.

They are not inherently 'inventive user-friendly'.  And, hence, you end up
with the graduates of such degree programs who go on to teach it
themselves not being very good teachers of it.  And thus the cycle
continues.

> OTOH, that group is now investigating Rev, so all is not lost!

--I only wish CSUF were one of them... :-(

Judy