Contents

• Overview
• Installation
• Dreamweaver MX
• Fireworks MX
• Flash MX
• Freehand MX
• Discussion
• Final Words

• 500 MHz PowerPC G3 processor
• Mac OS X 10.2.6 and later, 10.3
• 256 MB RAM (512 MB recommended)
• 500 MB available disk space

Testing Systems

• iMac 17" 800Mhz G4
• iBook G4 14" 1.33Ghz

Installation
Installation is more flash than substance. The Studio MX installer is literally a Macromedia Flash application. It looks pretty, but doesn't provide many options. The first screen you see lists all of the products in the Studio. The only obvious control is a button labeled, "Install...". Clicking that button brings up another Macromedia Studio MX dialog that has a single control labeled "Continue...".

Feeling silly, you'll click that to get to the end user license agreement. Interestingly, you must agree that Macromedia may audit your use of the software (whatever that means) for compliance with the license terms at any time. If you are not in full compliance with the license terms, you shall reimburse Macromedia for expenses related to the audit.

After clicking to accept the license terms, you get to a Setup dialog, where you may again click an "Install" button. This time it actually installs the software! By default the software will be installed (as it should be) in your Applications folder. You may select a different installation folder, but there are no other useful options.

Once you get to this point, the software installs easily. Surprisingly, the Flash installer prompts you again to see if you want to install Flash. This is because the Flash installer is a separate application that is not very carefully integrated into the Studio installer. The Flash installer is also unique among the Studio application installers in that it tries to open a browser window onto Macromedia's web site. Of course, this fails in an inelegant manner if you are not online at installation time.

The most critical installation option missing is the ability to install the documentation. There are 62 megabytes of useful documentation (Installation, Getting Started, and User Guides) that are NOT installed with the applications. You must browse the installer CD to discover that these documents exist, and manually drag them to your hard drive. An installer option to install documentation would be helpful.

It turns out that there really are some hidden options on the top level Studio MX installer after all. If you mouse around, you'll discover that many of the text labels are actually buttons. Each of the product names is a button. You could click on the Freehand label to put the installer into a mode where the single "Install..." button only installs Freehand. Some other text labels turn out to be web links to the Macromedia web site.

The worst part of the whole installation process is the product activation. The first time you launch one of the Studio applications (I launched Dreamweaver), it asked me to enter my 21-character product activation code. If you have an Internet connection, you enter your serial number into a dialog and you're done. I didn't have an Internet connection, so I was punished by having to phone Macromedia and tediously enter a much longer string of numbers to activate the product. The instructions warned that it could take as long as 10 minutes to activate the product that way. After entering each group of numbers on my touchtone pad, I was forced to wait while the automated system slowly read the numbers back to me and asked me to confirm that it was correct. My frustration grew as the activation failed and I ended up having to talk to a woman in India who couldn't help me. The only positive in the experience was that I would only have to endure this once: a single product activation takes care of the entire Studio suite.

At least that's what the woman in India told me. Days later, after my product activation was resolved, I was successfully using Freehand and Fireworks. When I launched Dreamweaver, however, it wove me a product activation nightmare. A dialog popped up and told me that my product activation code was invalid. After going ballistic for a few moments, I quit Dreamweaver in disgust. Don't ask me why, but a few hours later I tried launching it again and this time it started up correctly. I surmise that there is a bug in Macromedia's product activation code related to a first-time failure activating one application in the Studio MX suite followed by the successful activation of a different application in the suite.

Product activation is evil. It starts off the customer relationship with suspicion, aggravation, and possibly rage. I read rumors that Adobe's new Creative Suite will require similar product activation, so there may be no getting around it.

Integration
One of the key aspects of Studio MX is the integration between the tools. Is it a collection of separate software thrown together in a box, or has Macromedia taken care to see that the tools work well together?

Macromedia Studio touts its "integrated workspace that allows seamless transition between products." To me this evokes an image of applications that share data in some mysterious yet powerful manner. Such is the power of marketing obfuscation. Reading Macromedia's documentation carefully, one discovers that it simply means that the panels, menus, and icons are similar across products.

A uniform look and feel certainly is a laudable goal, but in this version, the Studio MX applications bear only a certain family resemblance. Even at the highest level there is still much room to improve the shared look and feel. Freehand, Fireworks, and Flash display a tool palette at the left, but Dreamweaver uses a tool bar. Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash all display a "Welcome Mat" panel that provides easy access to various startup operations, but Freehand does not provide a Welcome Mat. Freehand, Fireworks, and Flash all display selection tools in the tool palette's first row; however each puts the Hand and Zoom tools in a different location. Flash and Fireworks share the same Hand and Zoom icons, while Freehand displays similar but different icons for those tools. Finally, a quick peek at the Preference panels in those applications will convince you that their developers work in different zip codes.

To me the real meat of application integration is in the way the Studio MX applications interoperate. Integration is accomplished by importing a file from one application to another, and this is something that the Studio MX applications seem to do quite well. In many cases one application can directly interoperate with another. When I am in Freehand, I can click a button to send a placed image file to Fireworks, where it automatically opens; when I save in Fireworks, the changes are reflected back in my Freehand document. Similarly, Fireworks has readily accessible buttons to export an EPS to Freehand, Dreamweaver, or Flash. Dreamweaver can export an image to Fireworks (albeit, this command is buried away in a menu). Flash can create various vector and image formats, but only seems to be able to write to files--I didn't see any way to send a document directly to one of the other applications.

There are some limitations to this data exchange. Still, I am quite impressed that Freehand can export vector data to a variety of different types of files, including images, Flash files, PDF, EPS, Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator, but I don't see a way to send one of those documents directly to Fireworks or Flash. Freehand can create an HTML page that displays the Flash version of my vector art, but there I couldn't find a way to automatically open the exported page in Dreamweaver.

Designing a Web Page with Dreamweaver MX

Website Management
A mainstay of many webdesign programs has been built-in website management functions. Normally this is at a minimum the ability to FTP (File-Transfer-Protocol) into the webserver and place your documents online. Dreamweaver takes this a step further by allowing you to manage your website and files directly on the webserver if you wish. The advantage here is faster updates to websites. This really shines when working on a collaborative effort.

One example of this is the relation that Dreamweaver provides with a program called Contribute (a scaled down, easy to use web editor by Macromedia). A web designer works on the site using Dreamweaver, and non-designers work on drafts that get saved directly to the website. The web designer then can promote the drafts to published resources, enabling version control and content control.

Dreamweaver is smart enough to also know what type of services that the webserver is providing, whether it be PHP, ASP or cgi-bin. By taking this into account, it can help to do some management of these servers, taking the burden off the web designer's time.

Help/Tutorials
As computers get faster, inevitably the software gets more complex. Being a web designer takes much more today than it did in the early days of the web when you could punch out a website using a VI Editor type program. There are a number of great features that sets Dreamweaver apart from the competition in the online help section.

There are two specific ways to get help; one is of course your web based help option that includes a knowledge network and tutorials, and the other is actually built-in instructions from some well respected off-line publishers, such as O'Reilly. The unique advantage is besides never leaving Dreamweaver for help, you can copy and paste sample code from the online books. The explanations of HTML coding within the program is one of the best implementations of a help guide for HTML code writing I've seen within a software application.

Comparing Dreamweaver MX 2004 to GoLive 6.0
The aforementioned are considered the two powerhouse software packages in the HTML design work. My personal experience has shown that in the world of web design, there is no one piece of software that is the end all. It seems that each has those one or two very unique features that makes it a must have.

Both programs are pretty equally matched, but Dreamweaver has stronger CSS editing and design capability. But just as impressive is the Macromedia support website, providing a great place to start learning how to use the product. Adobe has strong file/web management as well as ease of design in the WYSIWYG environment. The main disappointment from both the programs is the lack of pre-designed templates and clip-art.

Summary
Dreamweaver is an outstanding program for web designers. While it does not have the capability of taking a person and making them an artist, it will allow anyone with just a little bit of work to create some fantastic websites. Dreamweaver uses the latest CSS technology as well as design for just about any server technology out there. Smooth integration with the other Studio programs makes web design a pleasure. The simple web layouts (templates) and help is also very impressive. Dreamweaver is world-class as both an all-in-one/stand-alone piece of web design software or as part of the integrated Macromedia Studio MX 2004.

Pros

• The best help and tutorials, both on and offline
• Outstanding web project management, from FTP to workflows
• Excellent WYSIWYG interface, with support for Cascading Style Sheets
• Smooth integration with the other Macromedia Studio MX 2004 package

Cons

• No clipart included with the package
• More pre-designed webpages/site templates would make this a finished producted

Rating

4 1/2 out of 5 Mice

Example of Fireworks MX Interface

One of the more intriguing features is batch processing. You can select a group of files and perform the same set of operations on each file. For example, you can generate thumbnail images by scaling all of the images to fit in 72 x 72 pixels. The set of batch commands is fairly limited, so I hope that it can be expanded in the next release of Fireworks.

The one irritating feature of Fireworks is that it can be very hard to open a file in one image format and save it in another image format, unless that format is PNG. For example, Fireworks will open a Tiff file and let you modify it, but the "Save As..." command can only saves it as a PNG. If you want to save your file as a Photoshop, Illustrator 7 or Flash SWF, you must use the Export command. If you want to save a file as a GIF, Jpeg, Tiff, Pict, or BMP you must use the Export Preview command.

In the course of casual exploration, I found a troubling number of minor bugs. The "Find Source for Editing" dialog cuts off the descenders on a dropdown list. There is a similar redisplay problem in the Swap Image Behavior dialog. In the Batch Process dialog, if the export file path is longer than about 41 characters, only the top pixel of each subsequent characters is visible. There is a lot of annoying flashing behind the Batch Progress dialog. The Export Preview window appears to hang when changing a setting such as the JPEG quality, because there is no wait cursor to let you know that something is happening. In the Export dialog, when I cancelled out of a Save As Dreamweaver Library, five Japanese Kanji characters mysteriously appended themselves to a file name. PNG files are created with preview images, but JPEG files are not. None of these problems is fatal, but it does indicate that Macromedia may have rushed this release of Fireworks for the Mac.

Summary
Fireworks is a very capable image editor with some very nice features and one bizarre misfeature: you have to work too hard to use Fireworks as a general tool to convert images from one format to another. Users who care about that should use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements instead, but those who are purely web-focused will be fine using Fireworks.

Pros

• A very capable image editor
• Export Prevew command lets you tune image size and quality
• Batch processing automates certain repeated operations

Cons

• Features from Freehand and Dreamweaver have crept into Fireworks
• Lots of little bugs
• Hard to save a file in a different file format

Rating

3 1/2 out of 5 Mice

Sample Flash document

If you have some experience with programs like Adobe's Photoshop, then some of the features here will seem to have an intuitive nature, such as layers. The key to ease of developing animation with Flash is using the power of your Mac to have Flash "Tween" or draw the animation frames between your start and finish points.

Example of Flash MX Interface

Why Tween?
One interesting aspect of Flash files, as opposed to other forms of web-based animation, ie, animated gifs, is that Flash files traditionally produces smaller sized files with incredible graphical presentation. What are they doing differently? Basically, it comes down to the idea that everything within the Flash file is an object, and the file gives descriptors to tell the Flash player how to deal with them. In an animated gif, every frame must be drawn, so it uses more memory. You can have every frame drawn in Flash, but there is really no need to expend the extra memory, unless you have some very sophisticated animations that you are producing (see below).

With just one or two tutorials under your belt, you will figure out how to bring your text and graphics into your workspace, and have it dancing around placing your web audience at awe. Flash does require some patience and a small learning curve, but don't worry, because help IS on the way.

Help
One of the main panels that initially is in view from the moment you create a new Flash Document is Help. There are links to various resources for help designing Flash documents. The web based tutorials are excellent in providing some video instruction on how to develop your own animated flash documents. I was impressed that the video based instruction didn't come as an extra charge.

Ready to go
Flash is ready to go, out of the box, with plenty of features that will allow someone to build some excellent looking Flash documents. The basic tools that you get from the tools side panel are a text tool, a graphic shape tool (so you can draw squares and other items), graphic fill tools, selection tools, and more. As a designer, mixing text graphics and sound can be pretty intuitive with just a little knowledge.

You know that Flash makes some nifty looking webpage graphics, but what else can it do? Flash makes it possible to incorporate HTML and javascript right into the Flash document. The advantage here is that the Flash document stands on its own when incorporated within your website, and won't disturb existing code.

One of the great online demonstrations that shows how to integrate your HTML is an example used to sell Gulfstream Jet Aircrafts. The demonstration shows how an entire site can be designed and deployed using Flash. In the demonstration, the Flash document contains links to other pages with the Flash document, so you can view further information about the product. Instead of a static webpage, Flash brings your webpages alive. You can see how it's done at http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/evaluation/ or see the finished Flash enabled site at http://www.gulfstream.com.

You can also edit flash documents created by other programs, such as Keynote 2. I recently purchased Keynote, and had a small presentation that I wanted to make available for the web. Exporting that document as a Flash document proved to contain too much overhead, and expanded my presentation to well over 4 MB. Importing that document into Flash MX 2004, however, you can edit and recompress your file saving you and extraordinary amount of space. In my case, creating a file of only 340 KB. That's a big savings in overhead.

Flash can also do data manipulation by connecting to an application server. For example, this would be an advantage to a developer who is looking for an easy way to do user logins. Imagine creating the entire user experience within the Flash environment, and saving aspects of the work on the server side. Flash not only builds in the technology to do it, they provide gadgets that aid in developing that user experience. Pre-designed buttons, sliders, menus, fields and a variety of other objects are all part of this development package (in Flash MX 2004 Professional).

I was currently unable to try out some of the application services that are built-in to Flash. Some of those include PHP and SQL servers, To fully explore the more advanced features seemed to require a Server-Client environment. Having this capability even if you don't initially use it can allow the opportunity for future website enhancements using Flash.

Summary
Flash is the bling-bling of the Macromedia Studio MX 2004 package. It combines the power web-based animation, sound, and video into a truly unique multi-media experience on the web. Using the professional edition, you can expand your web development by creating Flash-based applications that use the power of application servers and data manipulation. It does all this without eating away at your bandwidth.

Flash is not for the beginner user. If you are willing to go through the training and tutorials, then you could be well on your way to creating some fantastic websites with this application. It also will not design anything for you, at least from a creative standpoint. Sure it comes with many great templates to get you started, but there are not enough templates to satisfy most people's tastes.

When you are ready to move your website into the future of web design, Flash will take you there as no other product can... in a Flash.

Pros

• Consistent look and feel with the other Studio Applications
• Creates low bandwidth presentations while maximizing a quality output.
• Plenty of online help and templates to assist an aggressive user to become productive with the software.
• Ability to incorporate many web technologies with the Flash Document, including javascript and html.

Cons

• Time consumptive to learn
• More shortcuts, clip art and templates would enhance this product for the casual user.

Rating

4 1/2 out of 5 Mice

The Freehand MX Interface

My test of Freehand on this task had mixed results. When I imported my TIFF test image into Freehand I was unpleasantly surprised to see it rendered it as a solid black rectangle. You can't trace what you can't see!

Fortunately, the Studio MX application integration came to my rescue. Although my first choice would be for Freehand to correctly render scanned images in all of the popular file formats, the next best thing is for there to be an easy way to convert scanned images into a form that Freehand will digest. In this case, I was pleased and impressed to see that sending my TIFF test image from Freehand to Fireworks was as easy as clicking a button on Freehand’s Object Properties tab. My test image automatically opened in Fireworks. Since it looked okay in Fireworks, I saved it in the suggested PNG format. Then when I switched back to Freehand the image updated itself and rendered correctly.

Once I could finally view the image, I found the task of converting the image to vector form to be easy and intuitive. I used the bezier tool and the pencil to trace the outlines. This type of work is somewhat tedious, but I felt every bit as productive as I would have using Illustrator. I especially liked Freehand's translucent fill feature, which I used to good effect in representing various levels of shadows in my artwork.

Freehand MX may well be easier to use than the ancient Adobe Illustrator 7.0 that I have for comparison. One of my pet peeves with Adobe Illustrator is the convoluted way rectangles are resized. Freehand deserves special note for doing this the right way: you can resize a rectangle by dragging any corner.

Freehand also includes some more finely crafted user interface advantages over Illustrator. For example, Freehand lets you use a single click and drag gesture to set the scale origin and drag to resize. To do the same thing in Illustrator, you must position the scale origin with a click and drag, and then use another click and drag to rescale an object.

Without trying very hard, I did encounter several minor bugs in Freehand. For example, after creating a rectangle I observed that its lines appear to have slightly different colors depending on the direction (e.g. from top left to bottom right) I dragged when creating the rectangle. As another example, the closed path indicator on the pencil tool can get lost on a black background because it isn’t drawn with a white halo. These minor bugs reminded me of similar quality problems I have noted in Macromedia Fireworks.

I also found one much more serious bug in Freehand. While investigating its support for Pantone colors, I discovered that Freehand requires that you individually select and import each Pantone color you wish to use in your current artwork document; the imported colors show up on a swatches tab, so you can easily apply them to the graphics within Freehand. After manually adding a few colors I then decided to open an Adobe Illustrator document (which Freehand is supposed to be able to do) that contained a few hundred Pantone colors. It took much too long to open: 89 seconds. Following this, Freehand's swatches tab did not display any Pantone colors at all. Thinking it was a redisplay problem, I switched away from the swatches tab and then back again. This time it took 41 seconds for the "spinning pizza cutter" wait cursor to go away, and after that Freehand's entire tabbed palette mechanism turned completely blank and refused to refresh at all.

Summary
On the whole, Freehand is easy to use. It has some powerful drawing tools that are lacking in my outdated Adobe Illustrator 7.0. A few bugs detracted from my overall positive impression of the product. Freehand performed well in my basic test, and was especially impressive on that test in the way that it interoperated with Fireworks.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Good interoperability with Fireworks
• Powerful drawing tools

Cons

• Not well integrated with Dreamweaver and Flash
• Several bugs

Rating

4 out of 5 Mice

4 1/2 out of 5 Mice