Shock-what? Shock-huh? That’s been the usual response from Mac users when asked about Shockwave – until now.
Shockwave, the internet technology that lets your browser use advanced multimedia to play games, music, etc., has been around for a long time, but the Mac versions were always very lackluster and faulty.
But now Shockwave 8, made by Macromedia, is stable and fast enough to become truly Macworthy. [Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005 and made Shockwave an Adobe product.]
After I installed Shockwave 8 (available at https://get.adobe.com/shockwave/otherversions/, approx. 3 MB), I was surprised. Previous versions of Shockwave required me to restart several times – and would still crash my browser many times before letting me play one game. That’s all changed now; the new Shockwave is the most stable it’s ever been.
The main reason people use Shockwave for is to play online games. But now you don’t even need to be online to play these amazing “Shocked” games. This is thanks to the new (to the Mac) program ShockMachine. This program (available at http://www.shockwave.com/) lets you save most Shockwave games on your computer for offline play. The best part of this is that even the most graphically enhanced game is under 2 MB! In fact, most games are under 750 KB.
Amazingly, ShockMachine is a very stable program and hasn’t crashed on me yet. Also, the ShockMachine program is very Shockwave-like. The buttons make sounds, things light up, and there’s a lot of animation. Just watching the program load is a treat in itself.
Apple really should try to adopt this technology now that it is very stable. Mac OS XI (I figure that would be the sequel to Mac OS X) would be very user friendly and intuitive (as well as just flat-out cool looking) if it were “shocked.”
In the end, Shockwave is capable of being a major player in the Mac program market.
Best of all, it’s free!
Publisher’s note: As of late 2014, the current version of Shockwave requires OS X 10.7 Lion or later and officially supports Safari. You can download Shockwave 7.0 through 8.5 from Adobe using this link.
Keywords: #shockwave #shockmachine
searchword: shockwave
