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.
2 responses to “Macromedia MX 2004 revealed”
They told us to visit http://www.macromedia.com/into which is a hidden page on the site talking about The new release.
They indicated that this page would be posted as a link from the home page, soon.
Actually, this is what the http://www.macromedia.com/into is about:
INTO – What are you into?
As an active Macromedia community member, we know you’re passionate about your
work and we know that extends to other parts of your life. That’s why we’ve
dedicated a site to you – INTO. You can submit your story , read others’, and vote on
your favorites . The site was built using MX 2004 products and features the new
Flash Player 7 capabilities.