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Macromedia: Macromedia Director
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Macromedia's biggest strength in the beginning was its Director and Authorware tools, programs used by developers to create educational and entertainment CD-ROMs. They then focused on the illustration and design fields in 1994 when they bought FreeHand-maker Altsys Corp. Macromedia kept the Altsys headquarters in Richardson, Texas, but renamed the organization Digital Arts Group of Macromedia. CEO James Von Ehr became a Macromedia vice-president until 1997, when he left to start another venture. The purchase saved the print page-layout FreeHand product, since an earlier acquisition of Altsys by Adobe (maker of the market leading PageMaker software) threatened its existence. Macromedia promised to promote FreeHand, despite some analysts' concerns that a graphics company could not adequately manage a print production product. Other analysts pointed out that a print production product rounded out Macromedia's offerings.
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Macromedia is a graphics and web development software house. Macromedia's main rival is graphics and publishing software company Adobe Systems. Macromedia was formed by the 1992 merger of Authorware, Inc. (makers of Authorware) and MacroMind-Paracomp (makers of Macromind Director). Its headquarters are in San Francisco, California. In 2001, Macromedia bought the web development company Allaire and added some Web development software to their products. In 2003, Macromedia acquired help authoring software company eHelp Corporation, whose products include RoboHelp, RoboDemo (Now Captivate), and RoboInfo.
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Macromedia supports the goal of making applications accessible to all, including people with disabilities. Director MX 2004 provides drag-and-drop behaviors that let you repurpose existing content easily to adhere to accessibility guidelines.
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"We are delighted to be working with Macromedia to assist Microsoft TV developers in creating exciting interactive content for our platform with Macromedia Flash," said Paul Mitchell, senior director of content, standards and tools for the Microsoft TV Group. "As one of the most widely used tools for developing high-quality user interfaces, applications, animation and graphics on the Internet, Macromedia Flash is easy to use, cost-effective and a vital part of the Microsoft TV Developer Program."
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Director, an interactive multimedia authoring tool widely used to make CD-ROMs and information kiosks, was Macromedia's flagship product until the mid-1990s. As the CD-ROM market began to decline and the World Wide Web gained in popularity, Macromedia created Shockwave, a Director viewer plugin for Web browsers, but decided it ... needed to expand its market by branching out into web-native media tools.
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Macromedia Director