I have on many occassions felt it would be great to see a tool like Director developed from scratch among networked programmers, a tool that learns from the history of Director and avoids the non-object-oriented heritage and other failings of Director. Timeline metaphors are very useful conceptually and they allow non-programmers entry, but usage of timelines should be *entirely* optional, ie, use them if you want, but they simply involve processes that are *completely* controllable via programming structures so that you don't have to use the timeline if your needs and project scale make the limitations of the timeline inappropriate.