Macromedia Studio 8 Unleashed
Macromedia today, announced the release of Macromedia Studio 8, which includes new versions of Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Fireworks, Contribute, and FlashPaper.
"Studio 8 is a huge leap forward," said Macromedia CEO Stephen Elop. "There are tremendous improvements to features and performance allowing designers and developers to build and deliver more expressive and compelling experiences for the web and devices in less time than ever before. Our beta testers worldwide agree: this release will fundamentally change the way people think about the creation and delivery of digital content."
Contribute and FlashPaper give designers and developers a cost-effective, streamlined approach to maintaining web content. Dennis O'Reilly of PC World writes:
Macromedia has overhauled its Studio 8 Web suite, but many of the changes are not to its individual apps. Overall, the $999 suite features tighter integration and improved links to databases and other Web resources; but if you work primarily in only one of the suite's big-name apps (Dreamweaver, Flash, or Fireworks), you may find few reasons to pay $399 to upgrade from Studio MX 2004.
Studio 8's rejiggered lineup adds Contribute 3 for updating site content and FlashPaper 2 for converting files to Flash or PDF. (The company released both programs individually earlier this year.) Absent from the suite is the Freehand drawing program, which was part of the two previous Studio releases. All three of the updated suite members--Fireworks 8, Flash 8 Professional, and Dreamweaver 8--work together more closely than ever. In fact, in the beta version I reviewed, I found that their look and features overlap so much that it's easy to forget which program you're working in at any given point.
"The well-integrated tools within Macromedia Studio 8 take advantage of industry-standard technologies, improve workflows, and go a long way toward helping media and web professionals remain productive, profitable, competitive, and successful," said Yankee Group research director Tom Dwyer.
Studio 8 includes new CSS enhancements and visual authoring tools for XML. It also includes new tools for authoring and testing mobile content.
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Chris Crum
