Macromedia's Studio 8

It was simple to create a basic animation, and I used the new capabilities of Flash 8 to dynamically control the animation frame rates at runtime. Blend modes and shadowing were also easily applied at runtime, and I could flick them on or off at will. Previous versions had made such graphical manipulations available only through an external image-manipulation program such as Fireworks.

Macromedia has developed a new video codec, and the company is moving aggressively to support video within Flash.

Sweet Dreams

Dreamweaver 8 integrates smoothly with the most widely used technologies, such as PHP5, ColdFusion and video, but it also has advanced CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) support that is far beyond anything I've seen in an HTML editor to date--no more developing CSS in vi for me.

The ability to visualize and edit CSS within Dreamweaver 8 astounded me. I could build a page from scratch and edit specific elements, such as a single DIV. When I dragged and dropped a DIV, Dreamweaver automatically updated the associated style for me.Dreamweaver offers a setting that visually separates CSS elements in the designer using color. This makes it a no-brainer to see where specific elements would appear in the resulting page.

Through Dreamweaver's Visual Studio-like metaphor for editing CSS, I could add properties as well as modify attributes of an existing style. With the click of a button, I chose the new attribute I wanted--borders, positioning or size--then edited the values right in Dreamweaver.

Overall, I welcome the changes to Studio. My only real beef is cost. Even after modifying its pricing, Macromedia is selling Studio 8 for a hefty $999 new--though you can upgrade to Studio 8 from any point product, not just prior versions of Studio.

Macromedia hasn't learned from the competition. Even Microsoft has bowed to pressure and understands you can't capture mind share if amateurs can't afford your product. Macromedia says it's aggressively pursuing just that market, but Dreamweaver and Flash products remain priced for the professional.Lori MacVittie is a Network Computing senior technology editor working in our Green Bay, Wis., labs. Write to her at [email protected].

Not to be forgotten, FlashPaper 2 and Contribute 3 are both useful additions to the Studio suite. Contribute 3 is a great way for nontechnical users to edit a site. It can be a little dangerous, so you won't want to point them at a production site, but for changes to content that need to be made by a business or nontechnical user, Contribute 3 can alleviate the need for IT to be involved with every little change to text on a site. Contribute lets the user send the changes made to a reviewer for approval. Although not nearly as robust as a content-management system, it's still a great little tool for managing small sites.

FlashPaper 2 shows up as a tiny menu bar within Microsoft Office documents. The synergy between Adobe and Macromedia begins to show here, with the option to convert a document to either Flash or PDF. A single click of the mouse and documents are instantly converted to the specified format.