Macromedia Studio 8 Upgrade Win/Mac review:5 stars (Don't be confused by hate!) - For any true loyal flash programmer/designer this is the update to get. Major improvement from MX, and MX04. Dreamweaver 8 starting to look like homesite which is the better. Don't let hate comments confused your choice, this is a well worth upgrade.5 stars (My Top 8 Reasons to Buy, or Upgrade, to Macromedia Studio 8) - 1. CSS layout visualization
Dreamweaver 8 now gives you visual aides at design time to outline CSS layout borders or color CSS layouts to reveal complex nesting schemes and improve selection. Click on the CSS layout for valuable Tooltips, such as ID and padding and margin and border settings.
2. Code collapse
Dreamweaver 8 allows you to focus only on the code in use. Hide and expand blocks of code by selection or by tag to stay organized.
3. Compare files
Dreamweaver 8 can quickly compare files to identify what has changed, whether it is two local files, a file on the local and remote, or two files on the remote server.
4. Alpha channel support
Flash Professional 8 now has support for a true alpha channel at run-time. This revolutionary new capability provides the unique ability to overlay video composited with a transparent (even semi-transparent) alpha channel over other Flash content. Create dynamic presentations such as splashing water, smoke and fire effects, as well as presenters shot in front of a blue screen.
5. FlashType - high-quality font rendering engine
Flash Professional 8 has a revolutionary new font rendering engine that provides clear, highest-quality font rendering, FlashType makes small fonts look amazingly clear and greatly improves readability. Choose from several options for font rendering, each optimized for different use cases. Optimize font rendering with the new custom anti-aliasing feature in Flash Professional.
6. Filters
With Flash Professional 8, you can create more compelling designs with built-in filter effects like drop shadow, blur, glow, bevel, gradient bevel, and color adjust. Filters are visual effects applied to MovieClips and text fields and are natively supported and rendered in real time by Flash Player.
7. Higher-quality video codec
Flash Player 8 has a brand new, far more advanced video codec, On2 VP6. This codec provides superior video quality that is competitive with today's best video codecs at a much smaller file size.
8. The most significant upgrade ever
All prior versions of Studio, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks are now eligible for the the same single upgrade price of $388.99 (save $10.01 on Amazon.com as of 09/13/05)!
Thats right, you can now upgrade to Macromedia Studio 8 if you own any one of the following products: Studio MX 2006, Studio MX, Dreamweaver MX 2006 or earlier, Flash MX 2006, Flash MX Professional 2006, Flash MX or earlier, Fireworks MX 2006 or earlier, FreeHand MX or earlier, Dreamweaver UltraDev, Dreamweaver/Fireworks Studio, UltraDev/Fireworks Studio, Flash/FreeHand Studio, ColdFusion Studio, JRun Studio (Any Version)
Please Note...
Macromedia Freehand is no longer available in Macromedia Studio 8, but is still available as a stand alone program. Freehand was replaced by the addition of Contribute and FlashPaper to better fulfill the typical design-develop-maintain workflow needs of Macromedia customers.3 stars (Worthwhile though pricey when upgrading Studio for nth time.) - Macromedia has delivered a worthwhile upgrade. The upgrade from version 4 of the Macromedia Studio to MX was well worth the money - a significant increase in functionality and workflow. However, the upgrade to MX 2006 was mostly about bug fixes. While I am all for bug fixes, I don't expect to keep paying for them. However, the upgrade from MX 2006 to '8' is actually worthwhile.
Some nice touches in the new release are:
Dreamweaver:
The new code-view Section Collapse allows you to collapse select sections of code while leaving other sections expanded - very useful.
Also, in Design View (which I rarely use), there is the addition of 'css layout backgrounds' and 'css layout outlines' (and more) in the visual aids drop-down. These allow one to have a better feel for where the css is and what it is doing on the page.
Unfortunately the much vaunted 'better css rendering in design-view' just doesn't seem to be there. I see some minor improvements but there remains the usual dissonance between design view rendering and browser rendering. Also, when you change the code, the design-view sometimes goes completely out of phase completely dropping items (php includes in one case) which were still in the code and displayed correctly in the browser but which the design view didn't render at all even though it had done so perfectly before changing a piece of completely unassociated code. Only closing and reopening the application restored the correct design-view rendering of the page in question. That just should not have to happen and any workflow improvements there may be fail to make up for the need to close and re-open the application several times a session.
Another excellent feature is the vastly improved writing, editing, and application of stylesheets for a page/site. It is much easier to code a standards-compliant site with pure css (no table) positioning for the layout.
There is some new tag completion logic in place too. It takes a moment to notice, but when you are typing a div tag (for instance) and you close it, instead of the end tab being added immediately so that you have to backspace in order to put content in the div, now the div stays open and you can put in your content. The cool thing happens when you begin to create an end tag for your div - all you have to do is type the '<' and the '/' and then it closes it by adding the 'div' and '>' for you. This has the added benefit of helping you make sure all your tags are closed in their appropriate order. If you try and close a div tag before you've closed a span tag within that div, when you type '
Fireworks
The most valuable thing here is the change from heavy javascript menus to the use of menu design based upon css where the css is exported to DW as an external file (i.e the menu is exported as a combination of html and a linked css file). This movement from javascript to css is a much anticipated improvement and I'm glad to see it in this release.
Also, the abilty to save images as other than png's without going through elaborate menu gymnstics is very welcome. PNG's are great, but sometimes you want to save as gif or jpg and you shouldn't have to jump through hoops to do it.
With the inclusion of import capability for QuickTime Image, MacPaint, SGI, and JPEG 2000 file formats, many options open up.
In my humble opinion Fireworks is still not as useful or intuitive as Adobe's Photoshop as regards image manipulation, but it's finally gaining ground in some areas: shaping text along a path for instance.
Flash
The inclusion of Flash Professional rather than Basic Flash in the Studio is the major improvement here. As well as some workflow increases which result from greater cooperation between Fireworks and Flash (as regards actionscript color recognition, etc) and between Dreamweaver and Flash (as regards the ease with which different types of Flash media can be inserted using DW).
Conclusion
Overall Studio 8 it is a sweet suite, but for those of us who have been updating their Studios since the early days, it is somewhat annoying that Freehand has been taken out of the Studio to be replaced by Contribute which despite having seen three versions now still remains a sophmoric piece of software (its very real potential has still not managed to be coaxed from latency by Macromedia - it still just doesn't know what to do with dynamic sites). FlashPaper2, on the other hand, is a thouroughly welcome addition to the Studio and I hope more developers begin using it for platform independent, cross-browser content delivery.
Download the free trials of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash and see how they work for you. You may feel differently.
P.S. While Dreamweaver does offer support for version differencing as mentioned by another reviewer, be forewarned that you must install a third-party app to make this functionality available. This is NOT YET a native Dreamweaver function.
P.P.S After using this a bit longer I find it to be EXTREMELY buggy. And css rendering in design view is worse than I had previously thought. This realease has major issues which are going to need to be addressed. Caveat Emptor. |
