Gimlé

Mark Bernstein writes in response to a New York Times rant on new media (more on that one later):

Any tool for creating computer mediated work will either be a programming tool, or it will be a crippled toy.

I can pretty much quarantee you that most people that disagree with this statement have never put together a medium to large-scale computer mediated project, have never earned a living putting together works like that (or teaching how to put those works together)…

… Or, more likely, they’re selling you something.

Flash is a half-way decent animation tool that used to be a broken toy when it comes to authoring computer media. It has gradually been turned into a schizophrenic programming/animation tool that happens to sort of preserve the sanity of both sides.

The graphic designers are lulled into a sense of security by having all of their usual vector-graphics drawing tools and layers built in.

But before they know it they’re using Flash’s fairly nice programming tools to put together Actionscript control statements and event handlers.

Director is another schizophrenic tool. But instead of being, like Flash, a loony of the “kindly, softly, gently” type (think James Stewart in “Harvey”), the schizo nature of Director evokes memories of Hannibal Lecter or Michael Myers of Halloween fame (the experience of long-term use being akin to crawling legless, still bleeding from your oozing stumps, over three kilometres of broken glass and rough sandpaper, only to be run over by a large truck two metres away from escaping).

Simply put, long term use of Director and Lingo leads only to the schorching pain of frustration, anger and desperation until you simply give up and let yourself sink down into the tarry pit of compromise and bug workarounds.

Sit down with Python or Ruby for a day and you’ll only return to Lingo under the threat of having your eyes plucked out and your frontal lobe fried to a formless stew.

And you might actually prefer having your eyes plucked out.

I hate Director and Flash is comparative sanity.

Director’s main problem is Lingo. As a language Lingo has to be one of the most haphazardly created language in history. Every release Macromedia slaps “feature of the day” onto the language with little thought about internal consistency or language coherence.

Even if Macromedia replaced Lingo tomorrow with a comphrehensive ECMAscript impementation (compatible with Actionscript) it would still mean that Director is just a more extensible Flash with Quicktime support, and without the XML support Flash has built in.

In the long term, though, what holds us back are not the bad tools or silly toys that the software companies think we want.

It’s fear.

Throughout the digital media field, everybody—from the enslaved students to the bankrupt producers—is frightened of code.

That mythical code.

Even just getting students to “view source” in a webbrowser, or to look at a simple stylesheet is practically impossible.

They think Dreamweaver represents all there is to web-design and that, citing Dreamweaver as evidence, web-design sucks.

They ask for help on the simplest problems if it involves Actionscript, not realising that if they just tried it would turn out to be much easier than the timeline-twiddling they are used to.

Even Director and Lingo aren’t rocket-science. (I just happen to hate the application, that’s all.)

Imagine trying to tell a group people who are frightened of code when Macromedia’s holding their hand that “y’know, pygame’s cool, and python’s xml features sound like exactly the thing you’re looking for.”

The look of horror when you tell them that they’d have to code

Followed by an immediate dismissal of the suggestion that it might actually be a bit easier than some of the stuff they are already doing.

I despair sometimes.

Baldur.
Clifton, Bristol.