Macromedia launches Studio 8 Web site development suite
The launch of a new suite of Macromedia's leading web development tools is a major event. It's possibly also the last 'Macromedia' version of the software - with Macromedia due to be absorbed into Adobe within the next couple of years. We take a look at Macromedia Studio 8 - to see if it's worth the time and cost of upgrading.
05 October 2005
The first changes which are evident with Macromedia Studio 8 are the omissions. Gone is the ‘MX’ moniker, reverting back to good old product numbering. Gone also is Freehand – the much loved, but definitely marginalised, illustration tool. Even the last version of the Macromedia Suite, MX2004, didn’t get an upgrade to Freehand, but at least it was there. It’s a market where Adobe’s Illustrator has the unquestionable lead, so Freehand is most likely to be sold or put out to pasture.
After installation, first impressions are somewhat underwhelming. It’s quite hard to ferret out the new features and the overall look and feel is pretty much the same. Dig a little deeper, though, and you soon hit gold dust.
The suite centres around Dreamweaver 8. Changes here are not massive, but significant nonetheless. They are almost totally focused on productivity – the kind of things which you don’t turn cartwheels over, but soon miss if someone takes them away.
First of all, you can zoom in on layouts, and not before time. Sure, you tend to look at Web pages at 100%, but it’s a real help when developing complex layouts and you need to get down to pixel level. You can now create guides within documents – again, really useful, as before this there simply wasn’t a way to check alignment. As you drag out a guide, a tool tip tells you exactly how many pixels from the left you are.
Dreamweaver 8 pushes hard in the direction of CSS-positioning for layout, encouraging developers to dispense with table-based layouts. You can now easily see the outlines of DIVs – and Dreamweaver also renders such layouts more accurately. There’s no real help in creating DIVs, and the best way to code these remains by hand. And here, Dreamweaver has seen some changes. Code completion is now much more intelligent, closing tags for you after you add tag content, not immediately after writing the opening tag. There’s a whole new coding toolbar, which allows you to easily collapse sections of code to make it far easier to concentrate on what you’re doing. You can also easily select parent tags – making it easier to see the structure of a document.
There’s also a new CSS panel, which lets you see at a glance the formatting information for any element – and change it quickly.
Nicely, Dreamweaver can now also preview graphics on the page you’re working on, even if those pages are on a Web server (providing you have permanent Internet access).
The whole collection of usability aids makes it much easier to edit Web pages, especially for developers (as opposed to designers) especially those developing XHTML and CSS pages.
Dreamweaver makes really short work of XML and RSS integration. Adding an XML or RSS feed isn’t much harder than dragging the URL onto a page and then adding in the fields.
As before, graphics are handled with aplomb by Fireworks. There’s a lot of concern that Adobe will drop Fireworks in favour of its own ImageReady, but Fireworks remains the superior tool. Of all the items in the suite, Fireworks is the least changed – something of a disappointment. It’s now more compatible with Flash, allowing objects to be imported and exported back, while retaining most of their attributes. You can import more file formats – including JPEG 2000 and QuickTime images. The automatically created drop-down menus now use CSS for formatting. There are twenty-five new blend modes, giving you more creative options when formatting objects.
There’s a new image editing panel which provides easy access to many much-used functions, such as scale and skew.
Usefully, you can convert marquee selections into paths – and vice versa. There are new ‘auto shapes’ which you can control from a new auto shape palette – useful for drawing stars and the like. And, after you add text to a path, the path remains editable – as does the text. Another new panel, special characters, makes it much easier to add in characters such as trade mark and copyright symbols. There are also more options when batch processing files.
The updates are welcome, but hardly revolutionary.
Flash, still the jewel in Macromedia’s crown, gets a decent raft of updates. These include the ability to make it easier to add video to Flash movies – something which has been a growing trend over the past couple of years. A new dedicated video encoder is also supplied to make this easier still. There’s a whole new focus on mobile devices – using Flash to create entire interfaces – or applications – for smart phones and PDAs.
Like the rest of the Suite, much thought has gone into ergonomics, and Flash now has more logically tabbed panels that take up far less space on the desktop.
Flash moves can now look better – with support for bitmap-style effects such as drop shadows, which are smartly rendered by the Flash player at run time, keeping your swf files lean. Adding features to an animation is now easier to control, using custom easing – rather than typing numeric figures for animation attributes, this is now done via an intuitive panel, where you drag a curved line to get the effect you want.
The Suite also includes Flashpaper, a printer driver which lets you convert pretty much any document to a Flashpaper document, which can then be embedded in a Web page. Finally, the inclusion of a copy of Contribute 3 goes part way towards the loss of Freehand. Contribute is a collaboration tool which is used to enable users to update their own Web sites without jeopardising the code or design. It’s limited, but useful – though many users simply won’t need it.
The best news is the price. At £699 for the full suite or £299 for the upgrade, Macromedia Studio 8 is very good value.
While the initial impression is underwhelming, a more considered view reveals a solid, if slightly uninspired update. With Studio 8, Macromedia maintains its leadership position with ease, while perhaps missing the chance to really shake things up.
