Macromedia Studio 8: A Bettor's Guide

By David Em

October 24, 2005

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When Adobe announced last April it was going to acquire Macromedia, it sent shock waves through the web design community. Since then, the acquisition's cleared DOJ review. The deal should close before year's end.

Meanwhile, Macromedia recently released its $999 Studio 8 web design and deployment software suite that includes Dreamweaver 8, Flash 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2. Since Adobe competes in the web design space, users who work with either or both companies' products have been attempting to interpret the tea leaves to predict how the product lines will merge a couple product cycles down the road.

This week I'll take a First Look at Studio 8 with an eye to which apps are complementary, and which tools are likely to bite the dust.

A Good Merge

There is considerable overlap between the Macromedia and Adobe tool sets. For example, Illustrator and Freehand are directly competitive vector illustration programs. However, programs like Macromedia's Flash fill in some crucial gaps on Adobe's side very nicely. Overall, the web creation community should benefit from the union.

Beyond code base integration, it will be interesting to see how the combined company pulls off a unified interface for its next generation of products. Both outfits have worked hard to unify look, feel, and functionality across their entire product lines, which include illustration, web, animation, and video elements. All those media represent very different working paradigms, which each company has approached differently, with varying levels of success.

Dreamweaver 8

Macromedia released their web design program Dreamweaver in 1997. I've always liked it, and it's improved with each iteration. Dreamweaver distinguished itself early on with a good design workflow that produced very clean code. The new version 8 integrates very closely with Flash and Fireworks to deliver a new level of cross-functionality.

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