[] Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, and Flash Player 8 ship with new advanced features and workflows
San Francisco, CA - September 13, 2005 - Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq: MACR) today announced the immediate availability of Macromedia Studio 8, the essential suite for web designers, developers, video professionals, and graphic artists to design, develop, and maintain interactive online experiences. Combining the latest releases of award-winning Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash Professional, and Macromedia Fireworks, and key productivity tools Macromedia Contribute and Macromedia FlashPaper, Studio 8 offers a new level of expressiveness, efficiency, and simplified workflow to create websites, interactive media, and mobile content. For more information about Studio 8, please visit http://www.macromedia.com/software/studio/.
"Studio 8 exemplifies our continued focus on delivering the best solutions for communicating rich information to global audiences across multiple mediums," said Stephen Elop, chief executive officer, Macromedia. "With tremendous improvements to features and performance, we believe Studio 8 will fundamentally change the way people create and deliver digital content all over the world."
Studio 8 contains feature firsts, workflow enhancements, and new products. Studio 8 includes groundbreaking new video encoding tools, which give customers an easier method for creating and publishing high-quality interactive video for truly memorable online experiences. New CSS enhancements and visual authoring tools for XML add style and sophistication to websites and applications. New tools for authoring and testing mobile content give Studio 8 the market lead in helping businesses reach the widest audience possible across multiple platforms. The addition of Contribute and FlashPaper allows designers and developers a streamlined approach to maintaining web content, making the upkeep of sites created with the suite even more cost effective.
The Studio 8 suite and its individual products are key application components of the Macromedia Flash Platform for delivering the most effective experiences for rich content, applications, and communications across browsers, operating systems, and devices.
Dreamweaver 8, available immediately, is Macromedia's latest release of the industry-leading tool for designing and developing websites and applications. New Dreamweaver 8 features include expanded Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layout visualization for easier design, drag-and-drop integration of XML data feeds, improved code hinting support for XML and XSLT, enhanced usability features such as zoom and code collapse to streamline the development process, and easier ways to incorporate Flash video content onto websites.
"Dreamweaver was clearly our answer when we needed to increase productivity in the Web editor community and reduce technical support for our intranet," said Christine Mitchell, content manager, Penske Truck Leasing. "The tight integration between Contribute and Dreamweaver is seamless and enables us to keep existing production workflow without sacrificing time or quality. The addition of Contribute to Studio will allow others to enjoy the productivity and cost-effectiveness that we have gained with these tools."
Flash Professional 8, available immediately, marks a significant release for Flash, the industry's most advanced authoring environment for creating interactive websites, digital experiences, and mobile content. Improved graphics performance, new graphic effects capabilities, new animation controls, script editor usability, Flash video features, and workflow integration with leading video editing and encoding tools allow the creation of rich, immersive content for the web that was not possible before. Flash Professional 8 is the professional authoring environment for the Internet's most widely distributed rich client runtime, Flash Player.
"The enhanced capabilities of Flash Professional 8 provide creative and technical advantages in developing the online presence for Underworld: Evolution," said Michael Lebowitz, co-founder, Big Spaceship. "In the past, effects like blurs, drop shadows and glows would have to be created in another program and imported into Flash. With Flash Professional 8, these effects can be applied directly, and in real-time, to objects and text. The results are reduced development time and smaller file size."
Fireworks 8, available immediately, offers many new and improved features for optimizing images and graphics for the web. Web designers and developers can now create interactive CSS-style pop-up menus, experiment with more than 26 new blend modes, import new file formats, and experience improved roundtrip editing with Dreamweaver 8 and Flash Professional 8.
"Using Macromedia Fireworks to design and enhance the customer experience on Ziprealty.com, we are able to provide industry leading online residential real estate tools to our customers," said Pat Lashinsky, senior vice president, product strategy & development, ZipRealty. "Fireworks has been instrumental in helping us design our interactive home search tool, our comparable home sales tool, and our comprehensive mapping functionality, to name just a few features. ZipRealty.com is continually striving to provide the best user experience for our consumers and we believe that Fireworks 8 will continue to play a key role in achieving this goal."
Flash Player 8, available immediately, is a major update to the ubiquitous runtime client. Flash Player 8 includes a higher quality video codec, an advanced text-rendering engine, and an improved security model and privacy controls to offer unprecedented performance in a lightweight runtime player. Flash Player is currently installed on over 600 million desktops and mobile devices globally.
PRICING AND AVAILABILITY
Macromedia Studio 8, Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, and Fireworks 8 are available for immediate purchase from the Macromedia Online Store at www.macromedia.com/store/. Localized versions in German, French, and Japanese are expected to be available this month, and localized versions in Spanish, Italian, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese are expected to be available in October. Studio 8 pricing is $999 for a full license (NA commercial) and $399 for an upgrade (NA commercial). Education, government, and volume pricing is available. To learn more about other product pricing and purchasing options, please visit www.macromedia.com/software/studio/.
ABOUT MACROMEDIA
Experience matters. Macromedia believes that great experiences build great businesses. Our software empowers millions of business users, developers, and designers to create and deliver effective, compelling, and memorable experiences — on the Internet, on fixed media, on wireless, and on digital devices. |
