Macromedia in Birmingham

I’m at the October IPSA meeting where this month’s special guest is Macromedia. Greg Rewis, Macromedia’s Chief Web Technologies Evangelist, is giving us a look at many of the new features packed into Studio 8 and demonstrating the tools and tricks that will make our design and development workflows more efficient.

Flash 8

• Garbage collection cleans up unused resources automatically (similar to Java) which enables much better performance and faster play time.
• Vectors are converted to images during movie playback so the entire screen does not have to be redrawn on each frame.
• New video codec = much better video quailty
• Alpha channel support in videos! Overlay a video with a transparent background over any other object.
• Automatic update of Flash Player on any platform/browser combination
• Full control over anti-aliasing of text makes small text easier to read and less “fuzzy.”
• “Skin” the Flash movie controls. Comes with over 30 default skins or you can create your own really easily.

Dreamweaver 8

• No more “inline” CSS is generated when using the GUI editor. Instead, an appropriate selector or div is created and the CSS code is placed in the head or external stylesheet.
• Layout outlines let you easily “see” all of the different layers. Zoom in super close to get your spacing and such exactly like you want it.
• Just as you can zoom in, you can also zoom out to view an entire page as a whole.
• Mouse over an object to view all sorts of CSS properties about it while in GUI mode.
• When an object is selected, a synopsis view lets you see every rule - not just the rules for that particular div, etc. - that applies to that object.
• Select a media type (print, handheld, etc.) when creating a link to a style sheet. View content using the print stylesheet (or any other associated style sheet) to preview how a page will look when printed.
• XSL - eXstensible Stylesheet Language. Create styles for an XML file to match your page/site, then bind the XML feed into a page. Full tag hinting/code completion for coding of XSL.
• Code View - Expand/collapse sections of code that you aren’t using.

Greg also notes that if you have any version of Studio, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, or Freehand, you can upgrade to Studio 8 for $399.