Macromedia Monday announced Macromedia Studio 8, the new version of its suite for Web designers, video professionals and graphic artists to design, develop and maintain interactive online applications and content
Macromedia Monday announced Macromedia Studio 8, the new version of its suite for Web designers, video professionals and graphic artists to design, develop and maintain interactive online applications and content
The Good: Better CSS for Dreamweaver (I don’t like Dreamweaver, but CSS in general is good), XML and XSLT improvements
The Bad: More Flash for mobile devices, new Flash effects, increased integration of Flash into Dreamweaver.
The Ugly: Still $999 for a full license. And their website still isn’t w3c compliant. Somebody should tell them that & needs to be represented with &.
“The Bad: … new Flash effects”
Flash 8 Pro is making me squeal with joy right now. The features look so yummy. Blur and drop shadows will alas be overused in the near future.
I agree that Flash is used for evil (ads, sites), but thanks to Firefox and the Flashblock extension, none of that bothers me much.
The Excellent: More Flash for mobile devices. Excellent RAD tools to help designers bring mobile applications to life. While Flash Lite 1.1 (what’s available now) totally sucks, the future looks bright with “Deuce”.
I love fireworks which is beter than Photoshop!
I’m suprised it was released under the macromedia banner I expected ‘Adobe’ to be plastered all over it….
The sale has not gone through yet; Microsoft got the government involved.
I must say if feels odd that Microsoft is doing something to prevent a possible anticompetitive action from being taken for a change.
For whatever reason, Macromedia thinks there is some great future for Flash and is putting a lot of effort into it.
It would have been nice if Macromedia had used the nearly two years they’ve had to make a much enhanced Dreamweaver. From what I read, it sounds like the bulk of development cycles went into Flash and Fireworks.
At this point without having tried the software, I am already disappointed. Macromedia bought Dreamweaver, bought Flash, but never really has grokked “the web” in all these years.
As Macromedia is raising prices and the current products all offer free upgrade to the next version, you can save $50-$100 or so if you purchase the current version and get your free upgrade next month.
As DW8 is really what DW2004 should have been, saving some money would be the smart thing to do.
BTW, here is the direct link to the DW8 features:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/productinfo/features…
for the eclipse-based tools from Macrodobe.
I bought MX Studio but skipped the MX 2004 version since I’m not really into flash. I’ve been waiting for this upgrade for a while now. I’m just glad that the upgrade will only cost me $400, same as the MX 2004 users.
Dreamweaver and Fireworks just sort of fit the way my twisted brain works. I love them. If they’d make this crap work on Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD I’d be able to drop Windows forever! (I know I know, it works on Macs… but they just don’t it for me for reasons I won’t get into).
“(I know I know, it works on Macs… but they just don’t it for me for reasons I won’t get into).”
I do hope that Macromedia’s promises of improved performance on Macs come true. Flash MX is perhaps the one tool holding me on the Win platform.
I just watched the Fireworks demo on their site and while it is my favıurite Macromedia tool, I have to say that Macromedia has given up with quality products now. All they do is add minor features (dotted grid? popup menu? oh, come on!) and release that shit to public.
While the major problem of their products in MX 2004 series is and only is SPEED, nothing is being said about inprovements in that area, which is pretty sad. And yet they claim that this release is the one that used most user feedback.
I just hope Inkscape catches up with clices and optimization support, because I cannot stand these “new releases” anymore, really
Not trying to be funny here, but Inkscape is so far from being comparable to Fireworks its crazy top try.
I wish this could be available for Linux, but I doubt that will ever happen…
You won’t see much big name desktop software going to Linux until we get some standardazation across distros.
That’s what I’ve been telling the community, but not many are interested. Different distros want to do things their way…
I wouldn’t be supprised to see this ported to redhat/novell and maybe a genaric binary self extracting archive or something
Macromedia is really missing the boat with the loads and loads of linux developers out there that would happily use macromedia studio
hell.. I would
Linux developers can already code in Flash. There are Eclipse plugins and the awesome mtasc compiler. Soon there will be OpenStep like components. No need to wait, get it done today