Adobe Shockwave (formerly Macromedia Shockwave) was Macromedia's first and most successful multimedia player prior to the introduction of Macromedia Flash (now Adobe Flash). It allows Adobe Director applications to be published on the Internet and viewed in a web browser by anyone who has the Shockwave plug-in installed.
Description
Shockwave is usually authored in the Adobe Director environment. While there is support for including Flash movies inside Shockwave files, authors often choose the Shockwave Director combo over Flash because it offers more features and more powerful tools. Features not replicated by Flash include a much faster rendering engine, including hardware-accelerated 3D, and support for various network protocols, including Internet Relay Chat. Furthermore, Shockwave's functionality can be extended with so-called "Xtras".
Platform Support
Unlike Flash, the Shockwave browser plugin is not available for Linux or Solaris despite vocal lobbying efforts. However, the Shockwave Player can be installed on Linux with CrossOver or by running a Windows version of a supported browser in Wine.
Shockwave was available as a plug-in for both Mac OS and Windows for most of its history. However, there was a notable break in support for the Macintosh between January 2006 (when Apple Inc. released Apple Intel transition based on the Intel Core Duo) and March 2008 (when Adobe released Shockwave 11, the first version to run natively on Intel Macs).
Applications
Although Shockwave was designed for making a wide variety of online movies and animations, its actual use has become concentrated in the area of game development. It is often used in online applications which require a very rich graphical environment. Online Learning tools which simulate real-world physics or involve significant graphing, charting, or calculation will often use Shockwave.
History
Shockwave 10
Last version to support Mac OS X (versions lower than 10.4) and Mac OS 9
Shockwave 11
Added support for Intel-based Macs.
Branding and Name Confusion
In an attempt to raise its brand profile all Macromedia players prefixed Shockwave to their names in the late 1990s. Although this campaign was very successful and helped establish Shockwave Flash as a dominant multimedia plugin, Shockwave and Flash became more difficult to maintain as two separate products. In 2005, Macromedia marketed three distinct browser player plugins under the brand names Macromedia Authorware, Macromedia Shockwave and Macromedia Flash.
Macromedia also released a web browser plug-in for viewing Macromedia FreeHand files online. It was branded Macromedia Shockwave for FreeHand and displayed specially compressed .fhc Freehand files. [1]
Later, with the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe, everything related to Shockwave is slowly being rebranded.
Market Penetration
According to Adobe, Macromedia Shockwave Player is available on 52.3% of Internet-enabled PCs.[2] It uses .DCR files created using the authoring tool Macromedia Director.
External links
References
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