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Download Macromedia Fireworks 8 for MAC

admin — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 17:09:49 +0000

Macromedia Fireworks 8 creates interactive Web graphics, such as rollover buttons, pop-up menus, and image maps. This update improves upon Fireworks MX 2004 by integrating better with Flash 8 and Dreamweaver 8, helping to keep designers from having to switch back and forth between the apps. If you’re planning to use Fireworks in conjunction with the animation tool Flash or the Dreamweaver Web page editor, this AU$230 upgrade is well worth its price. But given the steep AU$455 standalone cost of Fireworks, hobbyists in the market for a tool to optimise files for the Web should instead consider a less expensive image editor without the code-generating skills, such as Paint Shop Pro X.

Macromedia Fireworks 8 was simple to set up in our tests. Installing this 110MB program took a few quick minutes on Windows XP. At first glance, Fireworks 8 looks just like its predecessor. Look twice, and you’ll notice subtle improvements, such as collapsible panels that allow you to better control the work space with fewer mouse clicks. You can even save Workspaces to maintain the arrangement of your windows and palettes.
Also making Fireworks 8 easier to use are new tool palettes for image editing, auto-shape creation, special characters, plus numerous small interface tweaks. The handy image-editing palette offers easy access to commonly used functions, such as image rotation and filters. The auto-shape palette speeds the creation of rectangles, circles, and other vector objects, and the special characters palette provides more font control. Naming layers gets more intuitive as well.
Below the surface are fun new graphics effects, CSS menu support, and a broader range of import file types. Macromedia eliminated Freehand from its Studio 8 suite, partly because Fireworks deftly manages so many image tasks on its own. Fireworks 8 now includes 25 fresh blend modes, such as burns, dodges, and light effects — while drop shadowing easily makes objects appear three-dimensional. These are welcome new toys for creative interactive designers, though they’re less dazzling than the tools introduced to Flash 8.
Fireworks projects now flow better with the other apps in the Macromedia Studio 8 package. The ability to preserve and export the attributes of vector objects makes it easier to tinker with Fireworks files in Flash 8. In return, Fireworks can now recognise Flash ActionScript colour values. And to create content ripe for editing in Dreamweaver, Fireworks 8 facilitates the creation of pop-ups that use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and preserves more file properties from Adobe Photoshop. Fireworks 8 now imports more file types, including QuickTime Image, MacPaint, SGI, and JPEG 2000. Batch processing also gets easier.
Macromedia Fireworks 8 includes an extensive help file, plus access to an excellent online support centre, which offers numerous well-written FAQs and tutorials, as well as forums where you can chat with other users for free.

Buy Macromedia Fireworks 8 MAC – 54$

Download Macromedia Studio 8

admin — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:15:04 +0000

With new support for video and many enhanced graphics capabilities, Macromedia Studio 8 offers a powerful suite of tools that provides a real leap forward for the Flash platform. This new release succeeds at letting a variety of Web professionals create and deploy content smoothly.

The heart and soul of Studio 8 are Dreamweaver (for designing pages) and Flash Professional 8 (for Web development with Flash). We tested on Windows XP (Mac OS X is also supported) and were up and running quickly, though there are separate setup utilities for each tool. Also bundled in the suite are Fireworks 8 (for graphics design), Contribute 3.1 (for team collaboration), and FlashPaper 2 (Macromedia’s Flash-based alternative to PDF files). Integration between tools is generally pretty good in this release. For example, to edit a graphic, you can easily call up Fireworks from within Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver 8For page design, Dreamweaver 8 is as polished and impressive as ever. The new version bolsters support for current Web standards—especially CSS—with a new tabbed window that shows all style sheet definitions. This feature let us define and reuse several style sheets with ease. We like the starter library with model pages and style sheets. The tool also supports defining and reusing assets (such as graphics, style sheets, and other elements) across teams to promote consistency within a site.
In addition to excelling at visual design, Dreamweaver is still a fine tool for those who work with code behind pages, whether PHP 5, ColdFusion, ASP, or JSP. We like being able to deploy a set of pages to a site and keep working (via local caching of Web sites). Another noteworthy feature here is new XML support, which let us tag content using recent RSS standards for syndicating on several test pages.
In this latest release, Flash Professional 8 lets you tap new capabilities built into the Flash Player 8 platform itself. These include a new graphics engine that has new support for professional-quality video (using the On2 VP6 standard) and a more precise text-rendering engine. The new graphics engine also gets rid of some old quirks, like not being able to have truly square edges within Flash modules.
Support for high-grade video effects in Flash is clearly a standout feature here, one that Macromedia is betting will have site directors drooling. Besides support for encoding video into Flash format (in FLV files) from popular video-editing tools from Avid and Apple, Flash Professional offers an alpha channel that lets you mix in video with transparency and create blending and masking effects.
Once we were inside Flash, the environment let us add cue points for interactivity (via ActionScript) within a video clip. With the new support for video, the metaphor of timelines and scenes that has long been a part of every Flash developer’s vocabulary makes even more sense, since high-quality video content can now be placed alongside animations, sounds, and other layers.
More mundane improvements to the design environment in Flash include better use of screen space for multiple windows, control over local and global Undo functions, and better control of ActionScript coding and debugging. New APIs let advanced developers manipulate graphics down to the pixel level and access RSS content via XML-aware ActionScript objects. With Version 8, Flash gains extensive bitmap and pixel support, in addition to its traditional vector-based graphics. One worthy benefit here is that the player can optionally cache Flash graphics as bitmaps to speed up playback.
As in earlier versions, control of debugging and deployment in this tool is just excellent. The publishing wizard here offers highly detailed control of options, including the ability to deploy to earlier (and mobile) versions of Flash, as well as QuickTime support. Mobile reach here includes a built-in emulator for viewing Flash Lite apps for targeting smaller form factors.
Fireworks 8 gets many small improvements, including over two dozen filters that let you add graphics effects to your bitmaps. As before, Contribute offers lightweight workflow for teams maintaining content on Web servers. Though it will hardly replace a mature content management system, we like the ability to define rights and privileges based on user type.
Though all the tools in this release have been given numerous ease-of-use enhancements, Web designers and developers will especially appreciate the enhancements for CSS, RSS, video, and improved graphics available on the Flash player. It’s the polish and power underneath the hood that will likely make Studio 8 a must-have release.

Buy Macromedia Studio 8 – 54$

Download Macromedia Flash MX 2004

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 23:03:26 +0000

The Bottom Line
Macromedia Flash MX just keeps getting better and better. It started out as primarily an animation tool but has evolved into so much more. And this latest release makes it possible to design an entire Web site quickly and with exciting effects using Flash.

Pros
* Powerful ActionScript 2.0 adds OO programming
* Timeline effects and common tasks now done with one step
* Easy to import video clips
Cons
* Very complex, so difficult to learn
Description
* Flash is the industry standard for Web applications and animation.
* Strong integration with other Macromedia tools makes it easy to focus on the job of Web design.
* Third-party developers can extend Flash using the new JavaScript API.
* Using the new Flash player, you can boost performance by as much as 10 times.
* Spell-checker, search and replace, and macros help you work more effectively.
* Use simple check boxes to create accessible content.
* ActionScript 2.0 is an object oriented program language, more familiar to Java coders.
* New start screen makes it a snap to access most recently edited files and more.
* Support included for PDF and EPS files.
* Apply CSS styles to your Flash Web pages.
Guide Review – Macromedia Flash MX 2004
Macromedia Flash MX 2004 offers new timeline effects to make things easier for the developer, and a new version of ActionScript 2.0 that is object oriented. But the best thing about it is the speed. If you publish your projects for play in the latest version of the Flash player you will see between 2 and 10 times increase in speed and performance. For highly Flash focused sites, this could be a vital improvement.
The other improvements, such as timeline effects and behaviors are nice, but not as easy as I wanted them to be. Flash MX 2004 is not for the faint of heart. If you’re new to Flash, be sure to get a book to help you learn it. The online help is comprehensive, but I found it hard to read.
Creating a Flash Web application is a great way to create powerful, high-impact Web pages. And Macromedia Flash MX 2004 is ideal.

Buy Macromedia Flash MX 2004 – 54$

Download Macromedia Fireworks 8

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 22:41:29 +0000

When Fireworks was launched back in 1998 it was the first graphics application to concentrate solely on producing web graphics. What made it such a success was its integration of vector and bitmap handling, a combination that provided the best of both worlds: control and creativity.

Disappointingly in this latest release the core bitmap and vector tools are left virtually unchanged. There’s a new Image Editing panel which provides slightly quicker access to the most common photo-editing commands, and a new AutoShape panel that lets you take precise control of settings such as arrow length and spiral radius that were previously set interactively. You can also now turn vector paths into bitmap selections and vice versa. Other creative possibilities come from a new perspective shadow command that can be applied to open paths and text and a new Solid Shadow live effect that repeats the object itself to create its effect. And Fireworks 8 adds no less than 25 new blend modes to boost creative options for combining the colours in overlying objects.
That’s it for new graphic power, the rest of the enhancements in Fireworks 8 come in the form of workflow enhancements. Here there are various minor tweaks including object locking and automatic naming of text layers in the Layers panel, a new Character Insertion panel and smarter use of default folders for common operations. The biggest changes are to file handling with new support for JPEG2000 import and a new Save As command which is more convenient for saving standalone images than the Export dialog. Batch processing has also been enhanced with the ability to check dimensions when scaling, more powerful file renaming and the addition of a status bar and log file.
Unsurprisingly, integration with the other Macromedia applications has also been improved. Fireworks 8 now recognizes ActionScript colour values and Flash Professional 8 can now read Fireworks’ supported blend modes and some effects. For improved integration with Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8 now uses CSS by default when creating interactive pop-up menus. The result is much cleaner code that can be viewed and even customised in Dreamweaver’s CSS Styles panel though full-blown editing is better left to Fireworks.
In short, there’s nothing much to write home about and, as with Dreamweaver 8, very little reason to upgrade. It’s a serious disappointment as Macromedia could do so much more with Fireworks’ integrated vector and bitmap handling as Microsoft is currently proving with its work on Expression. Hopefully Adobe, which should shortly inherit Fireworks as part of its takeover of Macromedia, will appreciate the program’s true worth and realize its full potential.

Buy Macromedia Fireworks 8 – 54$

Download Macromedia Flash Professional 8 MAC

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 21:55:49 +0000

In many ways, Flash is like Photoshop. Neither has any real competition, and when new versions are released, there are the inevitable gasps of amazement from users and reviewers alike, shocked that neither program has decided to roll over and wallow in its own bloat for lack of contemporaries. Flash 8 Professional continues this trend, delivering what is the most significant update in five years (if not ever) and adding a whole new category of potential users to already crowded and varied list of user types.
You didn’t ask for it, but here’s some perspective anyway

Flash has traveled a mighty distance from its humble beginnings as a primarily web-based vector animation tool. With Macromedia’s latest update (likely the last under the Macromedia banner), Flash 8 returns to its roots in more ways than one, and the results are pretty spectacular. First, it’s important to note that the MX moniker is now toast, as Macromedia has gone back to traditional number-based versioning for Flash 8. While this probably seems like a small point, and I may be reading too much into things, dropping MX signals to me that the engineers have kicked the marketers out of the driver’s seat, a philosophy that is pretty evident throughout Flash 8 Professional (at least to me). It’s not a flashy (pun intended) upgrade, with questionable features slickly packaged and polished (a trend which is all-too-common, especially in more mature applications, as sadly was the case with new features in Flash MX 2004). Flash 8 Pro, plain and simple, delivers the goods. The mantra of Flash MX 2004 was all about the RIA (Rich Internet Application), an acronym that reeked of base corporatespeak and seemingly geared towards the buzzword-spewing suits of the world alone. And while Macromedia still uses “rich internet application” liberally, they’re really pushing the “Flash Platform” as their dog food du jour. Positioning Flash as an entire platform seems a little more in line with what today’s Flash designers and developers want to do with Flash, and represents almost a top-down push to evangelize Flash by having actual Flash users talk it up rather than rely on a cute acronym or empty buzzword that doesn’t really mean anything to customers. The Flash Platform isn’t really even about the Flash authoring environment; it’s about using the Flash Player as the portal to view content built with an ever-growing suite of products that produce Flash-based content (Flex, Breeze, RoboHelp, non-Macromedia products, and so on). And with Microsoft’s Expression suite right around the corner (which may or may not be gunning for a piece of Flash, depending on who you talk to), the Flash Platform is probably the right way to position Flash for future growth and acceptance. But as far as actually making Flash content is concerned, the big gun in the Flash Platform arsenal is still the Flash authoring environment itself, so it better be able to offer something to all the different types of users Flash has become attractive to. Fortunately, Flash 8 Pro doesn’t disappoint. Enough analysis, such as it is. Since I’m probably a couple hundred pounds of wrong anyway, let’s just get to the goods.

Buy Macromedia Flash Professional 8 MAC – 54$

Download Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 21:47:35 +0000

Macromedia Studio MX 2004 is the latest version of the most popular Web development software tools available.
Pros
* Everything you need to develop Web pages all in one package.
* Familiar interface between all the tools.
* Extensive community – for extensions, help, and support.

Cons
* Very complex for beginners.
Description
* Dreamweaver MX 2004 offers high-quality Web page development in HTML, ASP, PHP, and more.
* Macromedia Flash MX 2004 allows you to create dynamic Web applications and animations.
* Fireworks MX 2004 is a powerful Web graphics editor for animated GIFs and slices.
* Freehand MX is a full-featured illustration tool that integrates directly into the other tools.
* ColdFusion MX 6.1 Developer Edition included to help you create dynamic sites.
Guide Review – Macromedia Studio MX 2004
Macromedia Studio MX 2004 is a powerful tool for professional Web developers. It offers all that a professional developer might need to create, manage, and develop Web sites. Graphics, animations, illustrations, and the Web page design program all integrate together to create a whole system. The price might seem steep at first, but when you consider that you get Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, FreeHand, and a local copy of ColdFusion, and you realize that the price is actually very good.
If you’re a professional Web designer, you should pick up a copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004. You won’t need anything else.

Buy Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 – 24$

Download Macromedia Flash MX Professional 8

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 18:54:26 +0000

It’s hard to believe that Flash began life just ten years ago as FutureSplash, a simple cartoon-style vector drawing and animation program. Since those early days Macromedia has grafted on advanced multimedia and programming capabilities to turn Flash, and its all-pervasive player, into an all-encompassing web platform. Now to reinforce the program’s development credentials, Macromedia has phased out the old standard Flash and replaced it with a new version of the previously high-end, programmer-oriented Flash Professional.

After a decade of constant reinvention, today’s Flash Professional is largely unrecognizable but FutureSplash still lives on in the program’s bizarre approach to the fundamental task of drawing. Overlay two identically coloured objects, for example, and they merge together; overlay differently coloured objects and the top one eats a hole out of the one underneath! In skilled hands, the system can be surprisingly efficient, but for most users it’s an initial stumbling block and a constant irritation. Now at last the nightmare is over with the introduction of a new optional Object Drawing mode in which objects in Flash finally behave in the same way that they do in all other drawing applications.
In fact Flash 8 Professional’s vector drawing power has been enhanced all round to bring it more into line with the likes of Freehand and Illustrator. Using the Properties Panel, for example, you can now control end caps, mitres and joins. There’s also a Stroke Hinting option which ensures that nodes are anchored on full pixels ensuring razor-sharp horizontal and vertical lines. Gradient handling has also been seriously overhauled enabling up to 16 colours to be mixed with full control over overflow modes and focal points. Gradients can also now be applied to strokes as well as to fills.
Gradients are a crucial weapon in the Flash designer’s formatting toolkit, but they pale in comparison to Flash 8’s new support for blend modes. If you convert your objects to a movie clip or button (though not a graphic symbol for some reason) you can now apply one of 12 new blend modes – multiply, screen, lighten, darken, difference, invert, add, subtract, alpha, and erase – that control how the object’s colours interact with those below it. The compositional creativity this opens up is enormous, especially when combined with animations and run-time scripting.
Flash Professional 8 offers improved graphics handling.
And blend modes are only one of a whole new range of graphical effects that can now be applied to your movie clips and buttons. Using the new Filters tab on the Properties Panel you can add bevel, drop shadow, glow, blur, gradient glow, gradient blur, and adjust color effects – ideal for quickly creating Fireworks-style effects such as a bevelled button with rollover glow. The control offered over each effect is impressive and you can always fine-tune parameters as desired, and also animate them to produce effects such as a drop shadow moving in response to an apparent light source. Best of all, the effects processing is left to the Flash 8 Player so file size is hardly affected offering a major leap in end impact at little cost.
Devolving the graphics processing to the player cuts down on download time, but it can affect performance depending on the host computer. As such, Macromedia recommends limiting the number of effects you apply to any given object. In addition you can take advantage of Flash 8’s new runtime Bitmap Caching feature. This automatically converts static elements such as buttons and backgrounds to bitmaps so saving the player from having to process the same vector data for every frame – a huge boost to performance. All vector data is maintained so the clips can always spring back to life.
As well as its graphics handling, Flash sees a fundamental improvement in its handling of text. Again the benefit comes from building the required intelligence and processing into the latest Flash Player, this time in the form of a completely new text rendering engine designed to provide the best possible display of anti-aliased type onscreen. To take advantage of the new rendering all you have to do is accept the new Anti-Alias for Readability default in the Properties panel or, if you want the absolute best, you can customize the thickness and sharpness of the anti-aliasing for each block of text. The improvements in quality and readability are particularly noticeable at the smaller point sizes used for body copy and should go a long way to help establish Flash as a platform for handling text-heavy as well as graphics-rich content.

Buy Macromedia Flash MX Professional 8 – 39$

Download Macromedia DreamWeaver 8

admin — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 15:32:58 +0000

Dreamweaver is the market leading professional Web design and development tool. It can be bought as a standalone product, or as part of Macromedia’s Studio suite, along with Flash Professional, Fireworks, Contribute and FlashPaper.
Now in version 8, Dreamweaver enables you to work graphically, constructing a site by dragging and dropping objects, or to hard code in HTML, complete with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Most developers will do the bulk of the work with the page editor and then tidy it up and add the clever bits by tweaking the code. The program is ideally suited to this approach, as you can have page and code windows open at the same time and can now collapse sections of code, to move quickly about the structure of your site.

More people are using CSS to improve the design and shorten the development time of complex sites and Dreamweaver 8 consolidates all CSS resources into one panel. You can also colour code the elements of your page to highlight where they’re receiving properties from. This makes it much easier to see how a hierarchy of style sheets is applied to your pages, though it does make them rather gaudy when you have the background view option switched on.
It’s not all about CSS. Handling of XML and RSS feeds has been improved, too, so you can drag and drop them straight into your Web pages. Dreamweaver is good on providing instruction through its help system and there’s a lot there on different ways of using XML data and the XSL styling language.
If your work involves designing for a range of different outputs – monitor screen, PDA, projection, print, TV or even a teletype machine – Dreamweaver 8 can render your pages for each of them and you can switch render modes at will.
At the layout level, the introduction of guides which you can drag from the rulers and lock into position at any point on the page is a big help. You can snap elements to them to speed object alignment and do the opposite – snap guides to elements – to align, for example, a column of buttons to a master button.
The move from Dreamweaver MX to Dreamweaver 8 isn’t as fundamental as the introduction of CSS support in MX was. However, the subtle changes here make both CSS and HTML coding more straightforward and should ensure that Macromedia keeps its pre-eminent position among Web designers.