Fireworks 8 - new and enhanced creative tools

• 25 new blend modes and support for special characters and AutoShape properties

Video

• New video codec integrated with Flash Professional, with alpha channel support and embedded cue points for interactivity
• New stand-alone Flash Professional Video Encoder can be installed on any Mac OS X or Windows system for batch encoding
• New Flash Video exporter plug-in for all popular non-linear video editing systems
• Add Flash Video to a site with fewer than five clicks of a mouse in Dreamweaver. Point Dreamweaver to the Flash Video file, select the playback controls, and publish.

Efficient Workflows

• Longer list of technologies that integrate: Adobe Creative Suite 2, ColdFusion MX 7, PHP5, Flash Player 8, latest support for Mac OS X "Tiger" and Windows updates
• User interfaces have been streamlined for higher productivity

So How Will This Affect Your Workflow?
The Macromedia Studio 8 products - Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, Flash 8, Contribute 3, and FlashPaper 2 - work in concert to provide the best design and application development environment for web designers and developers. Here's how Studio 8 provides the right solution throughout each stage of the web development process.

Planning a website
Before developing a website, establish its goals, determine its audience, and identify data source requirements. Then, begin mapping the site navigation. The graphics tools in Fireworks 8 make it easy to quickly create a site map illustrating how the web pages will relate to each other. Once the idea has been sketched, it's easy to convert the drawings to HTML pages with the one-step publish HTML feature in Fireworks. With drawings available as HTML, the pages can be posted to an internal site by Dreamweaver for easy access and presentation to the team.

Setting up a development environment
Setting up a web server, a development server, and a Dreamweaver site is next. Once web and applications servers are set up, define a website using the simple web site setup wizard in Dreamweaver, including local and remote storage locations for site documents. Set up the check in/check out capability in Dreamweaver to ensure that no two people are working on the same file at the same time. Sites defined in Dreamweaver can be shared with Fireworks and Contribute for seamless integrated workflows.

Planning page and screen design/layout
Use the professional design tools in Fireworks to comp a site's main pages and to create graphics. Add buttons, mouseovers, and pop-up menus without writing any code. Edit and optimize photos. Export an entire page to Dreamweaver, or slice up a page and export only selected sections, including graphics and HTML or use the Fireworks comp as a tracing image in Dreamweaver.

Creating content assets
Use the combined visual and code environment in Dreamweaver to build web pages. After creating bitmap and vectors graphics, such as buttons and rollovers in Fireworks and rich-media elements in Flash, integrate the assets into HTML in Dreamweaver. The seamless integration between Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks offers features like launch and edit for instant access to source files.

Building application assets
Frequently accessed or updated information on a website is likely to be stored in a database and pushed live with a web application server. Studio 8 supports creation of HTML-based web applications with Dreamweaver or Flash-based web applications that take advantage of the rich client capabilities of Flash Player, a database is likely required to store the information the website will deliver to users. Dreamweaver enables creating dynamic pages that support ColdFusion, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, and PHP technologies to connect to data sources. Create application interfaces in Flash and integrate them directly with a database.

Assembling, testing, and deploying
When all of the website pieces are ready, put them together in Dreamweaver. Special features for testing and validating designs ease this final production phase. Commands in Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash ensure every site meets accessibility standards. Finally, when the site is good to go, use Dreamweaver to deploy it to a server.

Maintaining and updating
Take advantage of Dreamweaver templates to define styles and standards for sites, and then allow non-technical contributors to update their content with Contribute. Set administration rules within Contribute, including setting permissions and workflow approval requirements. Content providers can easily update and edit content keeping the integrity of the site intact.

Studio 8 Feature Integration Details
Flash 8 and Dreamweaver 8
Flash and Dreamweaver together provide a complete development solution for creating robust web sites and rich Internet applications. Flash is the fastest way to create interactive user interfaces, while Dreamweaver offers a robust development environment for integrating Flash content with entire websites and application logic. Top integration features include:

• Flash Video - Adding Flash Video to sites is drop dead simple. Using a dialog-driven, five-click process in Dreamweaver, integrate video into sites and customize its presentation. Use Flash Professional for deeper customization and for adding interactivity. Batch encode digital video with the Flash 8 Video Encoder (available only with Flash Professional and Studio).
• Seamless integration of XML data - Design visually rich front ends to XML-based data using Dreamweaver and Flash. Within Dreamweaver, simply point to an XML file or live data feed and Dreamweaver will introspect it. Then just drag, drop, and style the content onto any page. Jump into code view to develop and maintain XML. In Flash, consume XML data created in Dreamweaver using a variety of methods, including the easy-to-use XMLConnector component, which simplifies the task of connecting to, parsing, and binding XML data at run-time.
• Launch and edit - Seamlessly launch and create or edit content in either Macromedia Flash or Dreamweaver; changes are automatically saved and versions are synchronized.
• Preview Flash files in Dreamweaver - The play/stop button on the Flash property inspector enables previewing a Flash movie in the Dreamweaver document window at authoring time for optimal layout and design.
• Delineate Flash parameters in Dreamweaver - Delineate any set of parameters for Flash files within Dreamweaver with the property inspector.

Flash 8 and Fireworks 8
Fireworks offers Macromedia Flash developers a roundtrip workflow between their bitmap production environments and Macromedia Flash. Although Fireworks exports custom HTML for many popular HTML editors, the tight integration between the two Macromedia tools makes Fireworks ideal for combining optimized bitmap graphics with vector-based Macromedia Flash websites.