Chris and I attended the local Flash users group tonight, where through a Breeze presentation, the Macromedia product managers gave a walkthrough of the new features in each of the MX Studio products. Here’s Gulfstream’s site, which was built entirely in MX 2004 Studio.

The upgrades for Flash and Dreamweaver look excellent, the highlights being for me:

Dreamweaver: Complete CSS support built in, including WYSIWYG positioning. I feel they should have had this ability in MX already, (given that CSS2 has long been released) but I suppose even now they have no competitors. A must-have for building svelte, standards-compliant sites, its WYSIWYG power will save hours when building entirely CSS-based sites such as this one.

Flash: now in 2 flavors, you’ll probably want to go with the “Professional” version. They’ve added Behaviors for doing common tasks that usually take a lot of writing Actionscript, making it easier for newbies to learn the program, as well as speeding up the workflow for anyone. What I like most about the Pro version is the “forms” view, which seems to better represent the way I think about most sites when I build them. It’s less timeline centric, and more focused around interacting and building upon data screens. That helps when you’re building applications. Timelines are for animations!

Did I leave anything out? Oh, boxes ship and demos are out mid-September they say.