Macromedia drops FreeHand from Studio

Posted on 8 Aug 2005 at 12:07

Macromedia has dropped FreeHand from the new version of its Studio software suite, adding to fears that the vector drawing application will be phased out when the company merges with Adobe later this year.

The company denied that the application would be dropped altogether, saying that it continues to be a successful product and available separately. Following the announcement of the merger, most commentators supposed that FreeHand would be abandoned in favour of Adobe Illustrator.

Studio 8 also excludes the ColdFusion Web development package in favour of the Contribute 3 application for code-free website editing and FlashPaper 2, an environment for converting documents, presentations and spreadsheets into Flash or PDF files. The core Studio components remain, albeit in upgraded versions: Dreamweaver for authoring Web pages, Fireworks for image editing and Flash.

Flash Professional 8, to give it its full new moniker, includes all the animation features traditionally associated with the application plus many enhancements such as a new video codec, On2 VP6, improved font rendering and real-time effects filters.

Dreamweaver 8 includes an emphasis on visual CSS editing and improved integration with the other Studio applications, while Fireworks 8 adds CSS pop-up menu creation, more filters and a streamlined interface.

Across the suite, Macromedia has worked on accelerating the design, development, and maintenance process, implementing reliable integration - round-tripping is the label it prefers - with Macromedia and third-party products, and features like batch processing and batch encoding.

In particular, Mac users should notice a marked improvement, with features and performance that match the Windows version, something that could not be said of the previous Studio package.

Developers will be able too make use of drag-and-drop visual tools and components, code libraries, and extensive code-editing support to build applications with HTML, XHTML, XML, ColdFusion, ASP, ASP.NET, JSP or PHP.

For all the details go to www.macromedia.com/uk. Macromedia Studio 8 is scheduled to ship in September for £699, or £299 for an upgrade.

Author: Simon Aughton