Afterimage: EnterFrame: Cage, Deleuze and Macromedia Director.(multimedia authoring software)(Evaluation) is a philosophical review of Macromedia Director that looks at the frame/score metaphor for organizing media over time and connects this to John Cage and Gilles Deleuze.
It would be interesting to trace back the history and theory of the musical score that seems to underlie the Flash/Director model for organizing multimedia over time. While Goldberg connects multimedia authoring to cinema, I think we have to go back to musical notation and Guido D’Arezzo.
A quote:
“Authoring tools are implemented based on one of four organizational approaches that reflect how the author or user is expected to conceive or experience the resulting package of media. They are the slide show, the stack of cards, the circuit-design model and the timeline model. All four approaches bear traces of real-world practices that have imparted some of their aura. The authored slide show (Powerpoint) is widely used (and abused) in corporate America, bureaucratic organizations and scientific communities. The card stack (Hypercard, Supercard) is probably the most venerable approach, having turned its metaphorical connections to epistemology, experimental publishing and the encyclopedia into a concrete function: the hyperlink. The circuit-based model (Authorware, mTropolis) emerged as an alternative to the established timeline model, and came from a decidedly more technical background in computer-assisted design tools. In circuit-based authoring one “wires together” various iconic media assets, events or actions, resulting in a flowchart that represents the overall logic of the project. A timeline-based tool (Director, Flash) employs the more intuitive “tracks over time” approach; Director gathers all of its interface conventions and production approaches under the umbrella metaphor of making movies” (Section “Movie.Score.Frame”)
Where I think he is wrong is that the score has its roots in music notation – repeatable elements coordinated over time using a notation.