Mr. Potter and … Technology Director (Shockwave)

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This technology may be familiar to fans of playing mini-games on some websites. Those who have studied the supplementary discs for the official two-disc editions of Harry’s adventures may also have noticed small applications created using this technology.

To use applications created using this technology, it was necessary to install a special player in the system, which was built into web browsers. Which made it possible to play games or applications directly on web pages.

But, like Flash technology, this technology was retired: the official website only contains information that the technology is outdated and no longer supported. You cannot load the player.

It would seem that you can get around this limitation and install the player from old stocks. But it is not so. For some reason, the manufacturer of the player introduced a two-stage installation (roughly starting from the 10th version). That is, the user installs the player, but on the first launch, the player downloads from the official site and installs an additional module. After that, you can fully use the applications.

But if the user wants to install this player now, then usually the problem arises at the second stage of the installation. That is, the installation of the player supposedly completed successfully, but when you try to launch the application page, the player shows the «Installing components» splash screen. He is trying to download the second module from the official site, which has been removed. Therefore, the application cannot be launched.

Quite strange implementation, isn’t it?

What applications were created for the wizarding world?


Games. There were very few of them and they were very simple in structure.


Additional materials for films. The Wizarding Events application can be found on the supplementary discs. It was a list of approximate dates and events, accompanied by relevant movie clips (QuickTime video player had to be installed to play video files). The language is only English. At the same time, the disc for the first film contained a version of the application with the events of the first year only, the version for the second film already took into account the events of the first two films. Fourth film version … yes, based on the first four films.


What conclusion can be drawn? For example, you may notice that this was another attempt to make web pages more beautiful and useful. But the implementation of the player, especially the two install steps, and the popularity of competing Flash technology made the technology not particularly useful, especially after the web standards began to operate normally on the Internet.

The value of technology to Harry’s wizarding world? Very doubtful.

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