iGeeks

September 11th, 2005

Macromedia Launches Studio 8 in India

Macromedia launched Studio 8 in India last week . It is by far the biggest launch in the history of macromedia. I personally visited two of the launches , first at Mumbai and second at Banglore. I have attend all the launches since Flash 5 , Never before have I seen the audience applauding the new features so much. The speakers from Macromedia were fantastic.
Engineers at macromedia really have done a great job and added features that improves the work flow immensely , these were things that the designer/developer community had been asking for and they ve got it all.
Be it flash , where adding a video is no more a ‘only for experts zone’, there are several new effects like

drop shadow and then there is blend mode. Most importantly it gets implemented in a way that your file size does not increase as compared to when you add this effects in photoshop and then import the images in flash. Another interesting feature was ‘video on video’ which was not possible earlier. Designers, What did you miss the most in Flash MX 2004 ? ‘Normal mode’? , Normal mode is back in a more meaningful manner and is now called ’script assist?. You just have to fill up the blanks and the script assist will write the script for you !! Lot of improvements have been made in flash player too, Its much faster then earlier versions of flash players. Also ‘text’ in flash will now appear more sharper and clearer then ever. Well all these feature makes it a only for designers version ? Not really , some 13 new classes have been added and also developing mobile applications/games will be easier ,Though you can use only flash 4 type of scripting , Macromedia has included excellent UI for testing applications targeted for flash lite player. Different handsets from various companies support or do not support certain features , and also within the same company there are different models with each having its own resolution , player capability etc. The UI includes all the models which currently ship with flash lite player , not just that , if a particular phone does not support the code that you have written, the simulator will show a customized error pertaining to that feature not being supported. Now you can just concentrate on the coding part and dont have to worry about which handset supports what features etc. You can download profiles of latest handset that are being newly launched, from the macromedia website.

In Dreamweaver the most interesting feature apart from support for some Best Practices and improved CSS support was collapsible code feature. Once you see it you will realize how cool a feature it is.Adding flash video ( flv ) to your website has been made very very simple from within dreamweaver 8.

Studio 8 includes other products like fireworks , contribute and flash paper 2 , thus making all the tools you need for the web available to you. Contribute makes lot of sense when you have to maintain large websites or have multiple people working on a website. Flash paper 2 helps you to convert any document in word, PowerPoint etc to PDF or swf format.

Macromedia has also changed its licensing policy .Now you can upgrade from any of the older versions of any product like flash 2, flash 3 etc. to Studio 8 professional.

So folks, if you have been thinking of buying a few boxes, this is the right time.

I personally believe macromedia products offer quickest ROI and you get wonderful support from Macromedia.

#To know more about Studio 8 professional you can mail your query to nchawla@macromedia.com
#To Buy Macromedia Products in India you can contact
Mr.Harindar Salwan on 9821131170.
# To know about Macromedia Authorized Training for Studio 8 you can contact himanshu@teknopoint.info

Himanshu