Macromedia Studio 8 is out!!

Macromedia has released the much awaited & anticipated, Studio 8, which contains Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2. Contribute & FlashPaper are the two new entrants & Freehand has been removed. This probably is also the last release of Fireworks as well, given the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe, I doubt that Fireworks will remain alive against the much more powerful & established heavy weight we know as Adobe Photoshop(& ImageReady)!! 😕

Damn, I regret that I didn’t go, even when I was invited for the launch of Macromedia Studio 8 on September 5 at Le Meridien, here in New Delhi. It should’ve been fun but then, there were more pressing matters at office & I simply didn’t feel that taking time out was justified, even though I had the “go-ahead” from my boss!! 😉

Now, this release of the Macromedia Studio is probably the last as well, it won’t be called Macromedia Studio afterwards, but that’s not the important thing about it. The star attraction of this release, as always, is Flash, which has several significant improvements over the last release. That includes more actionscript, more control, more fun & a new player ofcourse!! This new Flash is also aimed at the mobile developers, and Macromedia is marketing for mobile quite a lot, and the phones have started coming out with Flash capabilities & applications, so it won’t be long, we’ll see some great stuff on mobiles with Flash!! 😉 Another important stuff is Dreamweaver, ofcourse, with supposedly enhanced UI & support for CSS, PHP etc. this release is a must for those who use these products, but then every software vendor says so on every new release of their products(how else will they be able to earn their bread, eh!!). So what I think is that I’ll download the trial & check it out, if I get time enough, ofcourse!! 😉

This new release is tagged at a price of just $999 and an upgrade from a previous version is available for $399 & I also read somewhere that upgrade is free for those who have StudioMX 2004!! 😀 But I’m not sure about this last bit, so better check it out with Macromedia!! 😉