by , 3:10 PM EDT, July 26th, 2006

Adobe's product manager for Director and Shockwave, Tom Higgins, confirmed that a Universal Binary version of Director is in the works. Speaking in an interview with Digital Producer Magazine, Mr. Higgins said "Director will be updated to run natively on Intel-based Macintosh computers... In addition, Adobe plans to update projector creation abilities and the Shockwave Player to offer native run-time playback on the full range of modern hardware and operating systems."

According to Mr. Higgins, Adobe is firmly behind Director and plans to make sure that users know about the commitment.

The future of Director, the multimedia development environment, was called into question by long time users after Adobe purchased Macromedia. Aside from some minor plug-in updates earlier this year, information about Director support has been scarce until now.

Mr. Higgins couldn't be more specific, but he did confirm that the next major release of Director will be in the first half of 2007.