Macromedia Announces MX 2004 Product Family : New Releases of Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks and a new Product (Flash MX Professional)

Aug 23, 2003

by Judith Dinowitz

August 25, 2003 -- Macromedia announced their next generation of MX products, MX 2004, with improvements in speed, power and intuitive features that will make it easier for Web professionals (both programmers and designers) to create a much better experience on the Web. The products announced included: Studio MX 2004, Dreamweaver MX 2004, Flash MX 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, Flash Player 7, and a new product called Flash Professional MX 2004 that has both Michael and myself very excited. (More on that later.)

Studio MX 2004

Studio MX 2004 consists of Dreamweaver MX 2004, Flash MX 2004 (or Flash MX Professional 2004), Fireworks MX 2004 and Freehand MX, as well as the ColdFusion MX 6.1 Developer edition. Before I get into the details of any of the new products individually, let me speak on a more general level about what Macromedia customers can expect. Eliza Laffin, Sr. Product Manager for Studio, said that in this release of Studio MX, Macromedia has focused on making the product more:

Expressive, allowing users more control over all their output
Efficient, for more streamlined production and development
Extensible, with platform independence and support for standards, including, as always, Dreamweaver's support for all server technologies without prejudice.

A major aspect of this new release is that all of the products in Studio MX 2004 are more deeply integrated, and that things can be started in one product and easily finished in another. Fireworks' Roundtrip support now includes server-side code and nested tables, and the "check-in/check out" lightweight version control system will prevent you from creating two versions of the same file. It's very easy to import Fireworks images directly into Dreamweaver, or to define CSS styles in Dreamweaver and leverage them in Flash. Macromedia has created a symbol that shows this interoperability between the three new products (Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks). (View that symbol here.)

In addition, all of the products in Studio MX 2004 share a common look and feel, as in the new Start Page above common to all three new products.

There are two new concepts that you'll see in Macromedia's discussion of their MX 2004 releases: MX Elements and Halo. Both of them deserve a short definition, as they represent Macromedia's attempt to create a standard or sample look-and-feel for Web development, and to make things easier for their customers.

MX Elements are a series of interface building blocks and a new generation of embedded, interactive design patterns and behaviors. The MX Elements for HTML and for Flash make it faster for customers to build effective interfaces by bringing together a range of technologies including components, templates, CSS style sheets, and behaviors. (You'll here more about this when we discuss Flash MX Professional.)

So what is Halo? In its press release, Macromedia describes Halo as a distinctive new look and feel that all of the MX Elements share, and says that it hopes that Halo will "make the digital world a brighter, friendlier place."

I spoke to Michael Gough, chief creative officer at Macromedia, to get a better idea of what Halo is, and discovered that Halo is an idea in flux (and therefore difficult to pin down.) As it stands now, Halo is being touted as a set of standards for web-based applications, irrespective of the technology used, that Macromedia has created. Using such consistent rules creates a standardized look and feel for the web. The flux part is that this look and feel is supposed to be extendable so that in time, others will add their own ideas to Halo, expanding it outward. Macromedia has started by replicating desktop functionality in this look and feel, but I was told that in the coming months, other customized looks will be added to Halo and more information will be out on Macromedia's site.

If done well, Halo could indeed be on the cutting edge of emerging Web standards, focusing both on models of interaction on the Web and distinctive look and feels. The danger here is that if the standards are left too open, then Halo could lose its status as a standard and just be a collection of ideas that everyone says would be good, that each customer would follow in his or her own way. Such a thing has happened to earlier versions of Fusebox, where people were using something that was Fusebox-ish, but not exactly Fusebox.

Let's go into some of the individual products in Studio:

Dreamweaver MX 2004

One of the most exciting new features that Laffin showed us in Dreamweaver MX 2004 was its new CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) support. She said that one of the reasons CSS is not used as universally as it could be because it's been too difficult to implement. Dreamweaver MX 2004 is trying to make using CSS much easier. Laffin showed us an example of CSS in action in Dreamweaver, and it looked like something even a CSS rookie (like myself) could get into.

For example, the Tag Inspector in this version of Dreamweaver contains a Relevant CSS Panel, which shows the CSS styling attributes that affect the page element the user is editing. Within that panel, you can change the various CSS attributes directly, and they'll be automatically updated within the page itself. Using CSS, you can even add hover effects to links with two simple attribute settings. You can even cut and paste directly from Word and Excel, and Dreamweaver will automatically generate the CSS for you, behind the scenes.

The main complaint that many programmers in the ColdFusion community have is that Dreamweaver runs too slowly and takes up too much memory. The following stats should allay developers' fears somewhat: Jennifer Taylor, Product Manager for Dreamweaver and HomeSite, said that Macromedia engineers noted the following performance enhancements on a Windows machine running Dreamweaver MX 2004:

Upon opening a file in the split-screen view, there was a 44.42% improvement in performance.
Upon opening a file in the code view, there was a 49.55% improvement in performance.
When switching between applications, there was a 81.82% improvement in performance.

Some of the other features worth noting in Dreamweaver MX 2004 include:

Dynamic cross-browser validation - Dreamweaver automatically checks your code against the browsers (and versions) you specify, and alerts you of any rendering or tag support issues in Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera, and Mozilla, extending back several versions.
Integrated image editing, using Fireworks technology, directly within the Dreamweaver workspace
Additional right-click coder tools, including code hints, code completion, validation, and enhanced find and replace

Fireworks MX 2004

Laffin said that a team of dedicated engineers worked on optimizing Fireworks, and improved performance by 85%!

These features are new in Fireworks:

Check-in/Check-out and one-click FTP
New Auto Shapes
New Contour Gradient
New Live Effects, including Motion Blur and more
A new red-eye removal tool

Flash MX 2004

Lucian Beebe, Product Manager for Flash MX, gave us an inside look at what was coming.

Beebe said that for this release, Macromedia focused on streamlining Flash development for users and helping people who are new to Flash do projects faster. Performance in the Flash Player 7 is twice as fast as it was in Player 6. The Data grid in Firefly (the Flash Data Connection Kit) is now 50% faster for sorting components in a grid with the new Flash player.

Flash Player 7 is much easier to deploy, and has more support for standards, including HTML, MP3, SOAP, H.263 and Unicode. Flash MX 2004 contains controls for certain options that are commonly used in Powerpoint, such as fade, fly in and fly out, and it can import files from formats such as PDF, Photoshop and Illustrator. The Flash version of CSS will handle text formatting right now, but not positioning, so we're not at the point where we can position an object in Dreamweaver and then import it into Flash with the CSS positioning intact.

The new version of Actionscript, ActionScript 2.0, in Flash MX 2004 is more object-oriented. Other improvements include support for globalization and Unicode, a new chart wizard, and new timeline effects.

Flash MX Professional 2004

Now, for the product that Michael and I are very happy about, because we feel it makes Flash much more accessible to hardcore programmers:

The first thing you'll notice when you open up Flash MX Professional 2004 is the lack of the traditional Flash timeline. It's still available if you'd like to use it, but in Flash Professional's new interface, you can see that things are organized in terms of the Web application rather than a timeline for events. The top left-hand bar in the screen shot above lists a series of pages for the application, with the highlighted page appearing in the middle window as one would see it on the site. The main bottom panel contains the ActionScript code and is broken up into actions. On the right, you'll see some of the new features of Flash Professional that make it much more geared to programmers: a file setup with the all the files for the current project, the Components area, and the Component Inspector.

As Beebe described it, in Flash Professional, you don't need to know anything about the timeline to program in Flash. Everything can be done with components. Flash Professional is a forms-based development environment, so it's much more friendly to programmers. It also contains some very nice features that ColdFusion programmers will love:

A new, improved version of ActionScript
An interface that implies the functionality of Powerpoint and Visual Basic
Data connectivity from Firefly (the Flash MX Data Connection Kit)
Features that promote integration with a team of developers
Integration with professional video editing tools that support Quicktime, allowing you to create FLV (Flash Video) files directly. This is not in regular Flash MX 2004.

In Flash MX Pro, the ActionScript is visible in the bottom panel and everything is approachable, without the use of key frames.

Two Versions of Flash: How do they interact?

Now that there are two new versions of Flash MX, how does Macromedia handle compatibility between the versions (and between the new MX 2004 files and old MX files)?

Both new Flash products can read old Flash MX files (while, as you'd expect, Flash MX cannot read a file created in Flash MX 2004 or in Flash MX Professional 2004). When Flash MX 2004 reads an old Flash MX file, it creates a new version of the file rather than overwriting the old file, so that work can be imported without changing the old file.
Flash MX 2004 cannot edit the data binding and form information in the Flash MX Professional 2004 files, although the code will be accessible. This is actually a benefit, as designers can work with the layout without touching the programmer's part of the project.
External ActionScript files can be edited in Flash Professional, compiled, and used between both versions of Flash.
Developers can also compile Flash Components (SWCs) and pass around code with some protection.

Where are we now?

Remember that while Macromedia has announced these products, they will not be released for approximately another month. This means that customer feedback may still play an important role within the coming weeks. This does not automatically translate to new features as the beta is closed, but it can have an effect on minor things such as documentation, marketing and future direction. If you have any wishes or suggestions about these products, you can send that information to www.macromedia.com/go/wish/. For more information about these products, check out the following links:

Macromedia Announces the Next Generation of MX

Macromedia Announces Macromedia Studio MX 2004

Macromedia Announces Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004

Macromedia Announces Macromedia Flash MX 2004

Macromedia Announces Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004

Macromedia Announces Integration with Leading Professional Video Tools

Macromedia Announces Fireworks MX 2004

Macromedia Flash Player 7 Doubles Performance of Rich Content and Applications