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Product: Web Design/Publishing/Animation

Developer: Macromedia

Publisher: Adobe Systems, Inc.

Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3, 256MB RAM (1 GB recommended to run more than one Studio 8 product simultaneously), 1.2GB hard disk space, 1024x768 display supporting thousands of colors

Retail Price: $999.00 (upgrades start at $399)

Availability: Out now

It's with a heavy heart that I finally bring you my review of Macromedia Studio 8. If you're not sure why, just try saying Adobe Dreamweaver. Go ahead, say it out loud if you're not reading this review at work or in church. Try saying Adobe Flash. It's just wrong, like speaking about the Chicago Packers or the Boston Yankees.

It's not that I have anything against Adobe (Photoshop, you know), but I don't think they get what makes most of the Studio 8 programs so great. My colleague Gary Coyne swears by Adobe GoLive, but I've never been able to shake the belief that it was developed by frustrated page layout programmers who wanted the web to behave like the printed page. With Macromedia Studio 8, you get a suite of programs that understand the freedoms and restrictions of web design, and that deliver the tools that behave in a manner more conducive to designing sites that behave the way a website should.

This is most apparent in the fantastic Dreamweaver 8, which is probably the flagship program in Studio 8. The first thing users of previous versions of Dreamweaver will notice is the improved interface. The program now features a new tabbed document window (such as with Safari), making it easy to flip between multiple open documents. You can also save your preferred arrangements of floating panels, thereby ensuring your most used tools are always right where you want them. In addition, you can now Zoom in for a closer look at your page (although, I've found I use this much less than I expected), and you can use Guides for precise object placement. The Guides come with a ruler bar, which has proven tremendously helpful in measuring the pixels of various elements or determining the distance between elements. (In the past, I relied on Ambrosia's Snapz Pro X 2 for such measurements).

Dreamweaver 8 is faster now, too. Dreamweaver 2004 performed quite poorly in Mac OS X, but that problem's been addressed. FTP has been streamlined, too, as you now can continue working on your project while files upload in the background. Some FTP problems remain, however. Dreamweaver tries for too long to connect to a server from which you've been disconnected (I'd prefer if Dreamweaver immediately stated I've been disconnected rather than keep trying to find the connection), and it keeps trying to perform some odd, lengthy background task on my files when I switch from one project to another. I have to cancel this task to continue. If I don't, I'll sit there for minutes (depending upon the number of files in the website) until Dreamweaver tells me it couldn't do what it wanted to do anyway.

Dreamweaver 8's biggest improvement comes in its upgraded support for Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you're reading this review, you probably already understand CSS and what a valuable tool it is, and Dreamweaver 8 has embraced this technology wholeheartedly. Your CSS tools are all now located in one panel, making it easier to create and edit your styles. In some cases, you can even see what the style will look like when applied (when controlling the color, typeface and size of type, for example). This works whether your CSS controls are in embedded in your document or sitting in an external document. However, if you attempt to alter type (simply changing color, for example), Dreamweaver will create a new style and put it in your page's header tag, giving it a generic name such as Style 1. If it has to write CSS for such minor edits, I'd like it to be able to write the code to the external CSS file and allow me to name the style myself. (Note that you can still control elements without using CSS by hard coding the HTML in Code View.)

Dreamweaver's always quick to embrace newer technologies, and it does so again with its ability to integrate XML-based data. RSS feeds can be added to web pages with the simplicity of drag and drop. Visual XLST authoring allows for complex control of XML files, making this technology available to those without hard coding skills, and isn't that what Dreamweaver's all about? It's not a perfect program yet, but it's been growing in logical steps that have allowed me to grow with it, and I'll just have to hope that Adobe doesn't stunt that growth.

Now, ah, Flash Professional 8. Dreamweaver may be the flagship of Studio 8, but Flash 8 is the fun program. It's the reason people buy Studio instead of just Dreamweaver on its own, and it's the one Internet tool where I see what other people are doing with it and find myself wishing I was that good with it.

Of all the programs in Studio 8, Flash Professional 8 sees the largest leap in features. Perhaps biggest of these is the web video capability. I'm beginning to see more and more FLV (Flash Video) files on the web, and I welcome this change. Nearly all PC and Mac users will already have Flash installed on their system, so it breaks down the compatibility barrier while offering good quality videos at reasonable file sizes via the On2 VP6 codec. FLV video encoding can be handled from within Flash, from within other professional video editing tools (such as Final Cut Pro) via a plug-in and from a stand-alone encoder. Because of this, watch for the FLV format to quickly gain in popularity...or at least well beyond YouTube.

In the content creation area, Flash Professional 8 has greatly increased its vector drawing tools, finally making Flash a logical place to actually create the content you edit with it (before, developers would usually create the content in Freehand, Illustrator, or another program to then import into Flash). The usual filters are there (drop shadow, blur, bevel, etc.), blend modes can be composited for dynamic user interactivity, the gradient tool has been improved, etc. With text alone, the new features have proven tremendously useful, as they finally make Flash navigation menus a viable option for more web developers.

Scripting has been made a bit easier with Script Assist; it allows you to create scripts without having mastered the fairly complex ActionScript language. You're still going to need to know what you're doing, but Script Assist will help you on your way as you play around, rather than by forcing you to read a manual or make far too many mistakes. It's trial and error less trial fewer errors.

If you're designing content for mobile devices, you'll be happy to know that Flash Professional 8 now includes a mobile device emulator and an improved actions panel. Me? I'll have to admit that I wasn't so much concerned with these features, and didn't test them. They're bound to be helpful to many, though, and that's quickly becoming Flash's strength; the number of uses for Flash content continues to grow exponentially; if there's a new technology out there and it has a video screen, you can bet that it'll support Flash. Flash can still be a hard program to hop onto, but it's worth it now more than ever.

Then, you have Fireworks 8. Although this version sees some necessary refinements, I'm still disappointed by what it can't do. Actually, that's not entirely fair. I'm disappointed not by what it doesn't do, but by what it doesn't do right.

Take, for instance, pop-up menus. Macromedia promised CSS control over pop-up menus (versus the pervious JavaScript-based control), but they only half-delivered. The new menus require a cumbersome combination of CSS and JavaScript, and they don't take advantage of many CSS benefits, such as the ability to apply different colors to each cell of the pop-up on a DIV layer, or the ability to easily use custom background textures or animations. And although you can use Dreamweaver to edit the code generated by Fireworks 8, these edits are not then reflected in Fireworks; you will lose your Dreamweaver changes if you need to further the menus in Fireworks.

Compatibility between Fireworks and Flash is a bit better, but there are still some swapping issues. Flash doesn't support some of the new filters and blend modes in Fireworks, for example, and will either rasterize or ignore them when imported. This can be frustrating if you create what you think is a great design in Fireworks, only to find certain elements can't actually be used as you want (or, at least further edited) in Flash. Considering Flash's newly improved editing features, many designers may prefer to work solely in Flash.

But, that's not to say that Fireworks 8 is a loss. It now contains some features it's need for a while, such as the ability to reshape text on a path, perspective shadows and the ability to import QuickTime images, MacPaint images, SGI and JPEG 2000. Bitmap formats can now be handled and edited using the new Image Editing panel. Batch processing has also been improved, including the ability to check file dimensions when resizing during a process, which I found tremendously useful.

As part of Studio 8, Fireworks 8 makes sense. I can't imagine most people would want to upgrade to this separately, however, and I won't be surprised if it's the first program Adobe drops now that they've acquired Macromedia.

Contribute 3, on the other hand, is a solid upgrade from Contribute 2. It's faster, it supports CSS and it allows for more administrative control. As a web designer, there's nothing I hate more than turning a site over to a client to perform his own updates (especially when said client insists on using Microsoft FrontPage). It's not the loss of revenue that bothers me, it's the loss of that design from my portfolio, as clients will always—I repeat; always—screw it up. Contribute allows me to control what can and cant be edit, however, and that eases my mind, a bit.

CSS is the best improvement. Contribute 2 often ignored my CSS code or turned it into a jumbled mess, which only made things much more difficult for my clients. Contribute 3 handles CSS much more admirably, provided I didn't get too tricky. And speaking of tricky, for those who do understand HTML, Contribute users can launch Dreamweaver or BBEdit to make changes that the Contribute interface can't handle. This ability to can be shut off, which I usually do when allowing clients to make their own edits. If I want to make a change and am not at my computer with Dreamweaver installed, however, this ability gives me the control I want.

Contribute 3 is all about control, after all. It allows web developers to determine which elements of a page can be edited, which pages of a site can be edited, who gets to edit them, where elements can be placed, etc. This may sound like it's for those on a power trip, but most of my clients are thrilled that I can prevent them from really messing things up; it eases their mind when they go to make their own edits, and Contribute allows you to release control of more elements as those making the changes grow more confident in their abilities. Contribute 3 still needs to find a better balance between control for the developer and ease of use for those making edits, but it's a solid upgrade over Contribute 2, and it continues to be the savior of those who would otherwise be forced to deal with FrontPage.

And finally, with Contribute 3 comes FlashPaper 2, which allows users to convert some documents (mainly Microsoft Office docs) to Flash format. What does this mean? It means that by simply printing a document to a Flash file (like Mac OS X allows you to print a document to PDF), anyone with Flash or Flash Player will be able to read that document (i.e., just about everybody). Text in the .SWF files created by FlashPaper 2 can be copied and pasted into other documents and can be searched, and can even be resized in real time using a slider. The Flash files do a great job with graphics, too.

Why use FlashPaper 2 to create Flash files when you can just stick with PDF? No reason. Macintosh users will get more functionality out of OS X's built-in PDF capabilities than they will out of FlashPaper 2 created files, as the true power of FlashPaper 2 is reserved for Windows users. However, if you're looking for a quick, easy way to create small files that just about anyone can read, FlashPaper 2 is up for the job...for now. Again, I'll be curious to see what Adobe does with this product that's competing against its own PDF format.

To make room for Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2, Studio 8 has dropped FreeHand from the mix. This may not be a big loss to most users, however, considering the improved drawing capabilities in Flash and Fireworks. Freehand was probably overkill for this package, and I think it was only included because Adobe offers Illustrator in its web development package (Creative Suite 2). As it stands, Studio 8 is a tighter, ultimately more useful package that contains the best web development software on the market (Dreamweaver 8 and Flash 8 Professional). Fireworks 8 is a decent tool, but it still has some growing to do before it reaches its full potential. And Contribute 3 continues to improve in its ability to allow designers to turn basic web editing over to other people so they can focus on newer and/or bigger projects.

Whether you're looking to upgrade from a previous Studio package or are just now ready to purchase a suite of programs that includes pretty much everything you need to start designing for the web, you simply have no better choice than Studio 8.

Individual Ratings:

• Dreamweaver 8: 5 out of 5
• Flash Professional 8: 5 out of 5
• Fireworks 8: 3 out of 5
• Contribute 3: 4 out of 5
• FlashPaper 2: 3 out of 5