The Bottom Line
- Comprehensive professional Web publishing tool
- New and interesting features for upgrade customers
- Allows you to create polished Web sites quickly and with ease
- Support is expensive after the initial trial
- There are a lot of products and tasks which make it challenging to learn
- You must have owned a previous version of Studio to purchase at upgrade price
Description
- Studio 8 comes with: Dreamweaver 8, Flash Pro 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3, Flashpaper and more.
- It also includes downloads of Homesite + and ColdFusion developer edition.
- Runs on both Windows and Macintosh.
- Studio retails at $999 or $399 to upgrade from earlier versions of Studio.
- Workflow improvements make it much easier to move between the separate applications.
- Now you can author XML documents visually, with ease right in Dreamweaver.
- CSS layout visualization makes it easy to see where edges of things are and design more effectively.
- Zoom in on your designs to fix them down to the pixel level.
- Collapse tags in the code view to make it easier to see where problems may lie.
- Full versions of Contribute and Flashpaper make it easier to share and collaborate on files.
Guide Review - Macromedia Studio 8 Upgrade Product
Studio 8 is easily the best application suite for a Web Designer to have. It includes all you need to create dynamic, cutting-edge Web sites quickly and easily. With Flash Professional, you have multimedia movies and applications right at your fingertips. While Dreamweaver 8 gives you the ability to put those movies into your pages with ease. Fireworks allows you to edit your Web graphics, and Contribute and Flashpaper lets you share them with your colleagues. Macromedia Studio 8 is all you need to purchase to design professional Web pages.
One of the big objections I get to Studio is the price, but if you are or are aiming to be a professional Web designer, the price is well worth it. And with Macromedia's more forgiving upgrade policy you can now upgrade to Studio 8 with any previous version of it, dropping the price significantly. The only other drawback to Studio is the high cost of support, after the first 90 days, support can cost $99 a phone call or more. So if you're going to call Macromedia make sure that it's something you really need help with.
All in all, Studio 8 is a great product with a lot of online tools, support, and features that makes it the only package that a Web designer needs.
