Macromedia has announced the release of Studio 8, the next major version of its suite of web development products. In addition to Dreamweaver 8, the Studio package also includes upgrades to Flash, Contribute, Fireworks and Flash Paper. The one product that seems to be missing is Freehand, which has led some to speculate that the Adobe merger may have killed off the vector editing software.
Another interesting tidbit is that they seemed to have dropped their “MX” versioning in favor for the more traditional numbering system.
Dreamweaver 8 is said to have improved support for CSS, XML, and Flash Video creation and integration.
You can pre-order Dreamweaver 8 seperately or the entire studio suite from Macromedia.
“The one product that seems to be missing is Freehand, which has led some to speculate that the Adobe merger may have killed off the vector editing software.”
That would be fine if Adobe Illustrator is included in this package, which it’s not. So to create something with Flash, you could have used Freehand for your vector graphics, but now you gotta go out and buy the Illustrator for $500?
I think it was already pretty obvious that Freehand was on its way out (it didn’t get a new version for MX 2004). I suspect that what Macromedia has done is produce a package that is more coherently a web dev package. (Then there’s always the question of whether Fireworks has beefed up its vector capabilities.)
Personally, I like the look of the new package components. I almost never used Freehand, since I don’t do print design. Flashpaper looks handy, since I don’t plan on upgrading my Acrobat, which is a few years old.
Contribute – well, I think that was a smart move on their part. It will probably gain them a lot of sales (though not from me – I’m much more likely to go with a CMS).