Macromedia's Last Hurrah
cbrophy78 (177 pencils) | Thu, 2005-09-15 19:57Studio 8 is out i wonder if it is any good? And sorry to all the Freehand lovers out there. I guess thats one of the answers to the Adobe + Macromedia debate that has spanned since April. Is GoDead "not going to be there any more." And a nice yummy dish of Illustrator with a nice bottle of Flash, a very nice compliment to the suite. Premire and Director, ImageReady and FireWorks, Acrobat and FlashPaper, and a lower end version of CS with Photoshop elements, Premeire elements, and Contribute (Which should be Dreamweaver Elements). Most of this news is only fantasy, not to be taken seriously. I just have been excited since the initial news of the CS2 and the future of Adobe with the potential upcoming merge with Macromedia. I just hope that the software together will work as well as mostly everything Adobe puts out, and not like another buggy, hole ridden program that Microsoft profits off of.
Chris Brophy
Iklectek Designs
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I was at the launch of it in Dublin on Thursday and I have to say I was quite impressed with the overall integration. My main reason to go was Dreamweaver which feels more and more like word every day. (clunky interface, very workmanlike method of page construction).
While there was some nice features in DW like page zoom (finally!!) the CSS elements are still not as integrated as they could be. I would love to see a WYSIWYG CSS layout tool akin to drawing elements in InDesign or Quark. There are some new xml tools for syndication which work well and it was nice to see the product manager of Dreamweaver actually demo the program. You could sense her enthusiasm for the product. The profusion of panels is still the biggest annoyance in working with the program but they are offering a good upgrade price for any version of the program, not just the previous version.
They are pushing video in Flash 8 in a huge manner and most of the demo was showing integration of alpha channels in Flash video for fancy effects. Seems they want to use the ubiquity of the Flash plug in to leapfrog Real, Quicktime & Windows Media.
The Flash Paper tool installs as a print driver so you can print to swf from any app like Word which makes integrating a zoomable , searchable document very slick and easy. Still doesn't beat PDF but it's a start...
Reading between the lines of their comments at the Q&A..Director and Freehand are dead...which is annoying as I always preferred Director over Flash for multimedia work...
www.afterglow.ie
afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration
Wow you attended the launch at Dublin? That's cool. Dreamweaver's CSS features are still not developed yet huh? Pity, I was waiting to see if there was any improvement when Adobe came into the mix..
The Flash Paper Tool is going to compete with PDF that's for sure, but isn't it still vulnerable to the decompilers and such?
Anyway, are you going to buy Studio 8?
Freehand is dead. That sucks. :/
I might upgrade Dreamweaver but I have no need for the Flash features. There was a very quick demo of Contribute which was a shame. I think is a very interesting program for those who gets those 7am phonecalls from a client looking for a text change. Definitely would be a more popular program than Flash if corporations were using it in the same way they use Word.
They also showed that you can embed proper metadata inside swf's for search engines but it's still not an automatic process.
www.afterglow.ie
afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration
Initially I upgraded to DW 8, but after reading what's new in the others, upgraded to Studio 8 and there are a lot of nice features in all. I had a great deal of difficulty with Freehand and switching to Illustrator made my life easier. Already there is a good deal of integration with PhotoshopCS 2 and Flash which is nice because I've never liked the job Fireworks did with images. I think work flow will just get better.