When was macromedia studio 8 released

As always, a new release of Studio is accompanied with an update to the free Flash Player, whose new capabilities developers can take advantage of through Flash 8.

Online video has been improved with a new codec, the display of text has been improved with a new text rendering engine while new runtime capabilities let creators add drop shadows and blurs to video. In addition new graphics effects and animation control tools are now in Flash, as well as tools for creating content for mobile devices.

Flash video can also be created through Dreamweaver 8, the Web site building tool, with no more than five mouse clicks, said Guerard. Those who have sites with blogs, RSS feeds and syndication of information will appreciate the ability to do visual authoring with XML data. Dreamweaver will let designers create guides and zoom into layouts as design aids. Productivity improvements include a coding tool bar, the ability to collapse code and to do background file transfers while working.

Fireworks 8, for optimizing Web graphics, has improved interoperability with Dreamweaver and Flash, 25 more blend modes and better batch processing.

Besides shaking up its product line, the company has also mixing things up with its channel in Canada. According to him, Macromedia Canada, in its last quarter had more than 50 per cent of its sales go through the channel. Vector graphics app FreeHand MX has vanished from the suite, partly because it duplicated functions offered by Fireworks.

The most tantalizing new product in this bundle is Flash 8, particularly because it introduces alpha channel video creation and provides abundant new effects that animators can manipulate in real time. To shrink the file sizes and hasten the playback time of Flash animation on end-user desktops, Macromedia gutted and rebuilt its popular Flash Player. And Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver now optimize multimedia content for cell phones, PDAs, and other mobile gadgets yet to come.

Just don't expect Adobe's plans to buy Macromedia to result in hybrid Adobe-Macromedia software quite yet; Studio 8 offers no such surprises. We installed the entire Macromedia Studio 8 suite in less than half an hour without problems on our test Windows XP computer.

To make room for the suite, Macromedia recommends freeing up 1. Once you open the programs, their well-organized interfaces look similar to those in version Studio MX Nips and tucks include zoom-in views to examine layouts, as well as collapsible palettes to free up the work space. You can even save your customized work-space arrangements. And Flash includes Script Assist similar to the former Normal mode of Actionscript to visually guide you through coding.

Macromedia aims to make its complex suite friendlier for people who lack coding knowledge, although amateurs will need some education before diving in, particularly for the intricate Flash and Dreamweaver.

But professionals and design teams can jump right into work-flow improvements designed to reduce multiple round-trips between apps. Large companies also get tools within Contribute 3 to centrally manage Web sites with multiple editors. And subtle layout changes throughout the suite, such as ruler guides within Dreamweaver, help import graphics from Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Macromedia expanded Studio's tools for making dynamic and expressive content.

For example, with Dreamweaver 8, users can easily integrate Flash Video into a website. You can have video up and running on your Web site in less than five clicks of a mouse. With the popularity of blogs these days, Macromedia talked to several of the blogging software makers with the intent to add support for them in Dreamweaver 8. Unfortunately, that functionality will not be built-in to this release, but may make an appearance through extensions.

What we are doing is working with the extension development community to add support for those blogs. There are many more changes to Dreamweaver 8, which we outlined in our first look of the product.

Flash 8 Professional comes with many new features including higher-quality video and improved text tools, but Macromedia also focused much of their time on improving the experience for Macintosh users. Document tabs are now included in both Flash 8 Professional and Dreamweaver, a feature that was available for Windows in the last version of the suite. Flash Player 8 will now use Apple supported Open-GL to render graphics, a move the Macromedia says brings performance very close to its Windows counterpart.

Flash 8 Professional now includes Filters, which allow designs to be made with built-in filter effects like drop shadow, blur, glow, bevel, gradient bevel and color adjust. Adding the filters does not increase the file size of the Flash file because Flash Player 8 renders the filters in real-time.