Web DevelopmentStudio 8 is finally here with new versions of Flash and Dreamweaver. We take the beta version for a spin.
Macromedia Studio, the software suite that includes web design’s two most important authoring tools, is back. And what a wait it’s been: the usual 18 month development and deployment cycle stretched out to a little over two years this time. The delay was made even more unbearable when Macromedia previewed some key new features in its animation and authoring tool, Flash, back in November of 2004.
We were promised a faster, more efficient player, live graphic effects and a new standalone video codec. Thankfully, it’s all there – the stuff in this release will blow your animated socks off, complete with perspective fixed, live drop shadows.
While Flash delivers a series of sizzling new features designed to make jaws drop and heads spin, updates to Dreamweaver are more levelheaded, concentrating on coding features and CSS. It succeeds on some levels better than others. Macromedia’s site authoring behemoth is the yin to Flash’s yang: the balancing element in an offering that blows hot and cold.
Macromedia has enjoyed an amazing track record since it switched focus from print and CD-ROM to the web. Jettisoning a slew of baggage at the end of the Nineties, it launched Flash and Dreamweaver within months of each other. Both programs have gone from strength to strength in the years that have followed, with Flash becoming the de facto standard for vector animation and Dreamweaver the tool of choice for dedicated designers.
Unfortunately, the last release, MX 2004, suffered some early problems on the Mac. Reported performance issues were quickly identified and patched – but the suspicion remained that MX 2004 may have been rushed to the market a little too soon. This overshadowed an otherwise impressive launch and perhaps it’s one of the reasons Macromedia took their time to get it right with this release. The development cycle has been remarkably open too. Macromedia pride themselves on listening to their users, talking to developers and giving them what they want. Both Dreamweaver and Flash teams have been blogging their development process this time around, giving us glimpses of important features way ahead of the release date. When you’re number one in a field of one, it’s the kind of the thing you can afford to do.
Dream a little dream
For most designers, Dreamweaver 8 is the core product in the Studio 8 suite. Flash may have all the fancy moves but, if you were a shipwrecked web designer, marooned on a desert island with access to only one program, Dreamweaver’s the one you’d choose.
Compared to some previous Dreamweaver updates, this one’s fairly conservative. Coding is the focus, although there’s one key concession to the multimedia boom heralded by broadband. We’ll deal with that first because it had us squealing like small children when we saw it: you can now embed Flash video into Dreamweaver created pages, complete with a playback control set of your own choosing, using a wizard based interface. If you’ve ever tried to navigate the minefield that is putting video online, this takes the pain and guesswork out of it completely. Macromedia boasts that it now takes just five clicks.
So far, so cool. If you’re interested in whizzes and bangs your attention may wane as we describe the remaining new features, though. CSS gets some serious attention with a newly unified CSS panel that enables you to edit styles without having to go into a full edit dialog or nip over to the Tag Inspector. There are new visual aids too, similar to those that help you select invisible tables. Now CSS block elements can be colour coded, enabling you to see exactly where they are on your page. You can also choose how to render styles for different platforms too, or turn off style rendering completely.
Macromedia says that it’s tweaked the CSS layouts in Dreamweaver’s design view so that they look more like they would in a browser. However, Macromedia does seem to have overlooked the growing popularity among hardcore designers of fluid layouts with relative positioning. The program lacks specific tools to deal with them and one W3C layout we tried to edit looked broken in Dreamweaver 8.
Coding tweaks continue to dominate Dreamweaver 8’s story, with updates to the program’s code view. Adobe GoLive scores few points over its rival but its hierarchical code view, enabling you to collapse the structure of a page into a branching tree, was one of them. Now Dreamweaver has something similar but more selective, right in the main code window. There’s also a new set of tools for working with code available from a new coding tool bar running down the side of the window.
The one feature that Macromedia seems to be most excited about, though, is something that may leave designers feeling initially cold. Dreamweaver 8 features enhanced, drag and drop support for XML and XSLT data feeds. XSLT is a format for translating information from XML documents into data your browser can read, enabling XML databases, RSS feeds and the like to be embedded directly into your pages. The drag and drop support, incorporated into Dreamweaver’s familiar Bindings panel is augmented by further enhancements to the Code view. XML and XSLT hints are now part of the package. Powerful stuff, it’s true – and RSS is fast becoming the web’s primary dynamic distribution method.
The mighty Flash
If Dreamweaver forms the foundations of Studio 8, then Flash Professional 8 is the gravitydefying edifice above it. Now in its tenth year the package still packs surprises into every release. This one sees lots of cosmetic tweaks and minor revamps, as do all the tools in Studio 8, but there are also a couple of new features that make you want to shake the development team soundly by the hand. They call it the ‘biggest release of Flash ever’.
Image editing tools like Photoshop and Fireworks have long had graphic effects built in to them. Even the short-lived Adobe LiveMotion had filter effects. Now Flash has them, too, but Macromedia has taken an interesting approach to them. Instead of being hard rendered into a scene, Flash Graphic Effects are rendered in the player. So, for example, you can apply a drop shadow to an animating object. The shadow will change and mutate live – and there’s no additional overhead in your Flash file. There’s no need to convert vectors to bitmaps, either. The Filters panel appears as a tab in the Properties inspector, giving you a choice including glow, shadow, convolution, blur and other effects. Alpha transparency’s there too. The Filters sit on top of an entirely new level of code giving you pixel precise control over Flash elements through ActionScript – so those filters are just the tip of the iceberg for savvy programmers.
Watching the new graphic effects in action for the first time is a real wow moment but it’s not long before the new Flash hits you with another. Video has had a real overhaul in Flash Professional 8. Recognising that they have a potential to reach double the audience of any other media player, Macromedia has taken steps to make it much easier to manage and deploy streaming, high quality video in Flash. The Sorensen codec is still available but the new default is the On2 VP6 codec – previously available from third-party suppliers only. Outperforming Windows Media, Quicktime and RealVideo in quality terms, the conversion tools are built into Flash and available as a standalone encoder for batch processing.
Within the Flash authoring tool itself, you’ll find new video templates that enable you to quickly put together video control panels. No more messing with individual components and their parameters. As if all that wasn’t good enough, the same technology that brings you graphic effects now enables you to specify alpha transparency in Flash video. In turn, this allows you to composite video elements over other Flash content – live.
These two massive innovations leave us with little space to consider all the other tweaks that have been introduced into Flash Professional 8. They include code improvements to the Flash Player, improved font rendering, a new and explicit drawing mode that emulates other vector illustration tools, bitmap caching of vectors to speed up play back, gradient fills for strokes and many more.
One area of focus that must be mentioned though is Flash’s improved support for mobile content. Flash Lite export felt like an afterthought in Flash MX 2004. Now it’s fully integrated and ships with an interactive mobile emulator, which enables you to test Flash authored mobile content for a growing number of devices. There’s still no SVG Tiny support, though Flash Lite is growing in popularity and Flash is the best authoring tool for vector content there is. Now it’s the best video development environment and web application building tool there is, too.
Fireworks night
With indispensable tools like Flash and Dreamweaver, image editor Fireworks struggles to compete. It’s always been overshadowed by the popularity of Photoshop and, by default, ImageReady – yet Fireworks is a solid, strong web graphics production tool. That point may be moot when Macromedia Studio 9 comes along in another couple of years but if Fireworks goes, it will be a great pity. There are no ground breaking new tweaks here but every one of them is welcome. The biggest of the batch is the addition of 25 new blend modes and a couple of new filters. There’s a new set of sample buttons, animations and themes to help with production and the addition of a special characters panel. For us, the most useful changes were even smaller. The use of CSS in pop-up menu generation is one of them, while improved vector compatibility with Flash is another. Both guarantee better integration with other tools in the Studio 8 package.
Studio 8 is far more focused on web production than its predecessors. Vector drawing package Macromedia Freehand has been jettisoned from the bundle and replaced with Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2. Contribute 3 has been available for a while but is a welcome addition to the package, making the management of content in Dreamweaver built sites much easier for less technical contributors. FlashPaper 2 is Macromedia’s attempt to harness the power of Flash for the creation of crossplatform documents. It succeeds on all levels, being easy to use and creating great results. In deference to its main rival in this field, it produces PDF files, too. If you don’t already have Adobe Acrobat Professional, it’s a brilliant addition to your toolkit.
With so many tools available, both as part of the studio package and as standalone tools, the pricing structure is quite complex. Generously, Macromedia are enabling users to upgrade from any previous version. Flash Basic is the anomaly here. It’s cheaper to upgrade to Flash Professional than buy Flash Basic on its own – and it’s not available as part of Studio. At $1510 for the full version of Studio 8, it’s a big investment. Think about what you get for your money though; a bundle without a single strip of fat in it. Studio 8 does everything you could ask of a batch of web tools. With this installed on your machine, there’s really no need for anything else. In that sense it offers brilliant value for money. The upgrade price is even nicer – the updates to Flash are worth the money alone.
Some might say that the Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia will make a few of the tools in the Studio 8 redundant in a couple of years. We can say with confidence, however, that you’ll see further versions of Flash, Dreamweaver and Contribute, at the very least. The functionality of Fireworks and FlashPaper will live on, even if their names do not. Don’t miss out by trying to second-guess what the future holds, though – if you’re serious about web design, this is the package for you.
Macromedia Studio 8 Full $1510, Upgrade $605 
Verdict: Gargantuan upgrades of the main components combine in a bundle that focuses strongly on web building. This is a must-have package.