Free! Dreamweaver 8: Part of the Family

We made it!  This both Number 15 and Number Last in our series on Dreamweaver 8!  For this last look at the new Generation Next, I wanted to show you a quick glimpse of the rest of the family:  the incomparable Macromedia Studio 8!  All will be available as trial downloads (and purchase downloads as well) by the time you read this article, and I can’t wait for you to meet them all!

You already know Dreamweaver 8 through this series.  Fireworks 8 is its little sister and does for web graphics what Dreamweaver does for page coding.  The new version features blend modes, new pop up menus, new panels and gadgets all designed to make your web graphics award-winning and wonderful!

Big Brother Flash Professional has forever changed the way we see video on the web.  Complete with support for alpha channels in both the tool and the player, there is nothing better on the market short of a television editing bay and they cost somewhere around $35,000.  And that’s just one thing it does!  Flash has outflashed itself with this one!

And little baby Contribute has joined her Studio family to complete the picture with site maintenance abilities that are second to none.  She replaces Freehand in the Studio, making it a complete web application software suite.

And then there are the goodies.  Flash Paper for quickly creating Flash documents or PDF ones.  Flash Video Encoder for creating Flash video to fit on your web pages.  Cold Fusion Server 7 for testing your dynamic sites to make sure they’re ready for prime time.  And HomeSite + .. still the best code only tool out there! 

This article talks about Family .. this article tells you why you need to get to know them .. and this article thanks you for allowing me to be a part of your reading program for awhile. 

See you on the forums!

Nancy Gill

Team Macromedia for Dreamweaver 8/MX2004/MX/UltraDev

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Dreamweaver Crystal Gazer: The Power Of Dreamweaver 8

Dreamweaver 8 is an amazing program with many new, robust features and a lot to offer users on its own merits.  But there is a bigger picture here.  Dreamweaver 8 is available as a standalone program, or part of Macromedia's Studio 8, which is the premiere web development package on the market.

Studio 8 offers the web designer and/or developer the tools they need to get the entire job done.  It begins with concept and document drawing in Fireworks 8.  Fireworks 8 has a bonanza of new features including new graphic effects, new palettes and new production aids to get the job done quickly.

Then the workflow changes to Dreamweaver 8 and the now famous round tripping integration these two programs offer the user.  What was already good has only gotten better.  The integration is tighter; the option to directly edit a Fireworks image without leaving Dreamweaver works better; and html created in Fireworks in connection with graphic slicing, button production and popup menu creation imports right into Dreamweaver so the work flow can continue without missing a beat.

Fireworks and Dreamweaver have obviously set themselves up well to be the Dynamic Duo of web design.  But it's not forgetting Big Brother Flash, particularly not this time around.  Flash 8 is nothing short of earth shattering with its video support for alpha channels and its continued movement into the dynamic data driven arena.  Read the DMX Zone E-Book on Flash 8 by Sas Jacobs to learn more.

Finally, there is Contribute for site maintenance, whose introduction into the Macromedia Studio makes the Studio the complete web design package, from concept to design to development to maintenance.  If you have the entire Studio, you really don't need anything else. 

What's Different with This Studio

The most obvious difference between the former Studio and Studio 8 is the content.  Freehand is no longer a part of the Macromedia Studio, but that in no way means that Freehand is no longer an important product.  It's just that, in an extensive survey of users, the majority felt that Freehand was more of a print oriented product, while the majority of web users designed their graphics with the more web suited Fireworks.  These surveys indicated that the Studio needed to be directed more for the web user and the piece that was really missing was something for the maintenance of web sites after the design phase was over.  The natural choice was to replace Freehand, in the Studio only, with Contribute.  This made the Macromedia Studio 8 the complete design suite; from artistic design in Fireworks to document actualization in Dreamweaver with rich internet content and certain kinds of interface design being created in Flash, and finally maintenance of the completed web site in Contribute.

Also included in the Studio CD set is the developer edition of Cold Fusion 7, Macromedia's own server model, for the testing of Cold Fusion pages before live deployment to a production server, and HomeSite +, Macromedia's editor for the code-only-don't-give-me-design-view developer. 

And there are two more pieces.  Contribute comes with FlashPaper integrated into the product and allows for quick and easy PDF or Flash document creation.  Flash comes with the Flash Video Encoder for easy, quality Flash Video creation, which can then be inserted into web pages with Dreamweaver.

If you are one of the users out there asking at this juncture, "Flash WHAT?" then please allow me to explain and to encourage you to give Flash Paper a try.  Flash Paper is simply an add-on that will work as a standalone (just drop the document on top of the icon to start it up) or through the integrated menu it adds to popular programs like Microsoft Word.  You have two options with Flash Paper.  You can save the Word document as a PDF (wonderful for people like me who don't have the bucks to purchase Acrobat) or save the Word document as Flash Paper.  Flash Paper plays in the plain ole Flash player already installed in your browser, but it loads the document in a split second.  Remember that the Flash format is very small and portable so it stands to reason that any document associated with the Flash Paper would be small and very portable.  And since the Flash Player is already in 98.some browsers, you don't have to worry about downloading a plugin to see the document (unless you belong to the other 1 percent or less of the world's browsers).  Very simple, very sweet and very free as part of the Macromedia Studio 8.

The other nice free include is the Flash Video Encoder provided on the Studio CD.  It automatically installs if you install Flash 8 Professional, but you can also install the Video Encoder if that's all you need and you have no other need of Flash.  I was ready to look right past this one, since I already own a working version of Sorenson Squeeze, but I have found some nice features and a friendly wizard like interface meant for the ::ahem:: non-professional videographer .. that would be me.  When you get your Studio 8, please have a look at this lil baby .. it's a very nice little tool for quickly encoding a piece of video into the Flash Video format.