[thelist] Studio 8

Juha Suni juha.suni at ilmiantajat.fi
Tue Aug 9 09:14:02 CDT 2005


dwain at alforddesigngroup.com wrote:
> Chris George wrote:
>> Indeed. I notice Freehand is absent from their lineup! Very
>> interesting...
>
> maybe replaced by illustrator?

Most likely. Not a big surprise though. When Adobe and MM announced the 
merge it was clear that Freehand would be the first to go down. Not that I'm 
feeling sorry ;)

I'm really looking forward to the new Studio 8, especially Dreamweaver 8 
looks very promising with all the new CSS, XML and Code editing widgetry. 
Flash 8 should also be a big thing, and has lots of features many Flash 
developers have been waiting for a long time. Fireworks seems to have less 
big upgrades, although the two way paths-marquee conversion and improved 
batch processing might come in handy. Interesting to see how Fireworks and 
Photoshop go in the future. I'm afraid the latter might swallow the former, 
which would be a pity considering that their intended uses (at least 
originally) are/were pretty different.

Also included are Contribute 3 (have not tried personally), which I believe 
never became as big as they possibly hoped, and FlashPaper 2, which converts 
documents to Flash and, tadaa surprisingly, to PDF.

I also noted that the studio 8 upgrade (introductory offer $399) only 
requires _any_ version of dreamweaver, flash, fireworks. (quote: "Customers 
of any past versions of Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks or Studio are eligible 
to upgrade to Studio 8 for a single, simplified price"). So if you have some 
old MM software lying around, you might consider getting a hefty all-round 
web development package cheap.

All in all it looks like a major release (unlike the earlier MX 2004) and I 
will surely end up testing and most likely buying some of that stuff.

I wonder if this is the last major release before a possible merging of some 
MM and Adobe products (DW/Golive? FW/Photoshop? Freehand/Illustrator?). I 
doubt they would keep up many parallel product lines separate longer than 
necessary.

-- 
Suni 



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