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Is the latest version of Macromedia Inc.s Studio suite a swan song before its eventual absorption into Adobe Systems Inc.s Creative Suite? Or is Studio 8 simply what it appears to be—a major upgrade that significantly improves the two core components of the suite while removing an old component and adding some new ones?
Click here to read the full review of Macromedia Studio 8.
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Is the latest version of Macromedia Inc.s Studio suite a swan song before its eventual absorption into Adobe Systems Inc.s Creative Suite? Or is Studio 8 simply what it appears to be—a major upgrade that significantly improves the two core components of the suite while removing an old component and adding some new ones?
Only time will completely answer these questions as Adobes acquisition of Macromedia awaits finalization and then the inevitable settling-in period with the two companies takes place. But based strictly on its merits, eWEEK Labs found Macromedia Studio 8, which shipped last month, to be a very worthwhile upgrade, especially for developers who use both the Flash Professional and Dreamweaver components.
Studio 8s Flash Professional and Dreamweaver include major improvements that address previous weaknesses and increase usability across the board, both for code-oriented authors and those who are design-oriented.
Another major change in Macromedia Studio 8 is a shuffle of some of the suites components. Probably the biggest tweak is that the Studio suite no longer includes the Freehand drawing application. Suspicious types might conclude that Freehand is gone to make nice with Adobes Illustrator, with which it has long competed.
On the other hand, Freehand was never a good fit in the Web- and developer-oriented Studio, and its replacement by the Contribute 3 Web-content-creation tool makes good sense .
As in previous versions, Studio 8 runs on both Microsoft Corp. Windows and Apple Computer Inc. Mac OS X systems. In addition, the Flash Player continues its excellent cross-platform support, running on these platforms and on the Linux and Unix operating systems as well.
Studio 8 is priced at $999, with upgrade pricing at $399. This is significantly less than what customers would pay to purchase the components individually.
Next Page: Polished CSS capabilities.
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Dreamweaver has held the top spot among Web developers for a few years now, and it has been our preferred tool for Web site development for the same amount of time. However, the product hasnt been without its shortcomings, especially when it comes to dealing with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Dreamweaver 8 finally addresses the previous CSS weaknesses—in fact, with these improvements, Dreamweaver 8 is now quite possibly the best tool for creating and editing CSS.
The most notable improvement in this regard is the inclusion of a CSS Styles panel. Using the panel, we could easily attach a style sheet to a page and then access and apply rules through menus and by double-clicking. The old cascading menus are still around for those who like them, as is the option for working strictly in code.
Developers who prefer to work in the code will see welcome improvements as well. One particularly useful option in the code view let us highlight sections of our code and then collapse them to a single line, cleaning up our view as we worked on other sections of code.
In Design mode, CSS editing has been boosted with new visual enhancements that color-code CSS elements and borders, making it much easier to view changes and positioning .
Developers building sites that deal with Web services or other XML-related applications will also benefit from several new features in Dreamweaver 8 that greatly enhance its ability to work with XML, XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) and XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations). We used these features to easily deploy XML into content, to preview data integrations, and to work with XSL and XSLT in much the same way we worked with CSS.
Among the many other noteworthy features in Dreamweaver 8 are improved zooming capabilities and more detailed element positioning.
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Flash Professional 8 continues the progression of the Web application development tool from a complex script-oriented environment to a tool that both developers and graphically oriented authors can use with equal comfort.
In general, most of the new features in Flash Professional 8 are geared toward increasing usability. In our Opinion, Flash Professional 8 does well at this, removing or easing tasks that could prove tedious in previous versions. We especially liked the expanded stage work area, which let us store objects on the stage even if they wouldnt show graphically in the application.
In addition, we could draw objects directly on the stage without affecting other objects in the same layer. Flash now includes the ability to perform undos on an object level, and we could view all our Flash files in a single library panel.
Our one criticism as far as usability goes is how the Help window works in Flash. Rather than being a separate window, as in Dreamweaver, the Help window is part of the Flash environment, meaning that when accessing help or tutorials, we had to continually minimize or move the Help window rather than just tabbing back and forth.
From a quality standpoint, Flash Professional 8 has greatly enhanced Flashs ability to deal with images, colors and text. More anti-aliasing controls made it possible to have much clearer text in our applications, and bit maps now appear smoother in Flash. Improved gradients and blending controls gave us more options when applying colors and integrating objects in Flash.
New easing controls made it possible to generate a variety of animation motions using a curve-based tool, giving us detailed control over how objects moved in the animation. New filters also made it possible to add a wide variety of effects to objects and animations.
For those building Flash applications for mobile devices, Flash Professional 8 includes one of the most extensive emulators weve ever seen.
Using the emulator, we could test how our application worked on pretty much every Flash-enabled device and cell phone available .
Other new features in Flash Professional 8 include an assist mode to help those unfamiliar with Flashs ActionScript apply scripts without needing detailed knowledge of it and a new video codec .
The new video codec for Flash, called On2 VP6, is designed to provide greater picture quality at smaller sizes and greater interactivity in Web applications. Using the Flash codec, it is possible to encode in both this format—to support users with the new Flash 8 Player—and in the Sorenson Spark format for those with older Flash players.
Probably the least enhanced component of Studio 8 is the Fireworks Web graphics application. To us, probably the biggest and most welcome new feature in Fireworks 8 is simply the ability to save a file directly as a JPEG (along with other common image formats) rather than having to go through the more tedious task of exporting the image. Fireworks now works much better with Flash and supports CSS for creating interactive menus.
In addition, improved workflow features made it easier to reuse fonts, objects and preferences.
Along with Contribute 3, Studio 8 also includes FlashPaper 2, the utility for adding interactive PDF files to Web pages without requiring users to launch Adobes Acrobat Reader.
Next page: Evaluation Shortlist: Related Products.
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Evaluation Shortlist
Adobes Creative Suite 2 Depending on how things go with Adobes acquisition of Macromedia, this traditional competitor to Studio 8 could become the future home of most of the Studio applications (www.adobe.com)
Corel Corp.s CorelDraw Graphics Suite 12 Its not the major competitor it used to be, but Corel is still an able option for image editing and illustrations (www.corel.com)
Individual competing products Components of the suite compete with a wide array of individual products, from tools bundled with operating systems to digital asset management systems to high-end publishing platforms
Older versions of Studio suite products Like many other desktop products, Macromedias suite must compete against very capable and older versions that users are perfectly happy to stick with
Labs Director Jim Rapoza can be reached at [email protected].
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