Good news for any Macromedia users outhere. They’ve just announced the release of Macromedia Studio 8, the new version of its suite for Web designers, video professionals and graphic artists to design, develop and maintain interactive online applications and content. This product is expected to ship in September. Price is $999 for full license or $399 for an upgrade. This is Macromedia first product after being acquired by Adobe System Inc. The previous version, Studio 7, is released 2 years ago, on 2003.

Macromedia Studio 8 features the latest releases of Macromedia Flash Professional 8, Dreamweaver 8 and Fireworks 8, as well as Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2. The new release improves workflow features and includes new video encoding tools, new CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) enhancements, visual authoring tools for XML, and new tools for authoring and testing mobile content.

Dreamweaver 8 makes the best practices of web development available to everyone, from users working on their first website to those developing advanced web applications with Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). New visual tools in Dreamweaver 8 simplify the integration of XML-based content like RSS feeds into websites and applications using a drag-and-drop workflow. Other advancements include improved code hinting for XML and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).

Flash Professional 8 enables creative professionals to design and develop interactive content that provides customers with the most engaging online experiences. Flash Professional 8 now includes unique tools for designing graphic effects, animation, text, video, and content for mobile devices. New effects, including drop shadow, blur, glow, bevel, and color adjust, permit more compelling designs with pixel-perfect control and precision. The new custom easing tool enables precise control over animation. The revolutionary FlashType font-rendering engine ensures clear, high-quality text. These new expressive features raise the bar for the quality of business and individual websites and improve digital experiences.

Fireworks 8 is unique in its ability to support both vector and bitmap images. The new release adds a range of effects, enabling more beautiful, realistic, and higher-quality web graphics. The latest features include more than 25 new blend modes, such as overlay, color burn, additive, and subtractive, to alter the look of colors and objects. The new shadow effect adds a perspective shadow that gives images greater dimension and depth. Fireworks 8 was designed specifically for web designers as a stand-alone image editing and optimization tools and includes highly efficient roundtrip integration with Dreamweaver 8 and Flash Professional 8, letting users save time by sharing assets without having to reapply changes.

Macromedia Studio now included Contribute and Flash Paper. Contribute enables developers to modify or update content, and FlashPaper converts any file type to PDF or SWF file formats for Web readiness.

As an addition, Macromedia also announced the beta of Macromedia Flash Player 8, the next version of the Flash Player client runtime. Flash Player 8 features a new text-rendering engine, a new video codec, 8-bit alpha channel video, and performance and security improvements.

Taking web video to the next level, Flash Player 8 introduces support for 8-bit alpha channel video, allowing Flash developers to create innovative media compositions with interactive, semi-transparent video overlays over video, text, and graphics. The new video codec offers exceptional video quality at a lower bandwidth, significantly improving the overall viewing experience for users. Flash Player 8 offers substantial performance gains with video, ensuring faster and smoother video playback. Flash Player 8 also dramatically improves runtime performance through optimizations such as more efficient caching and platform-specific enhancements.

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