Macromedia Studio 8

You can bet your boots this was another Adobe-influenced decision, as it creates a potential bridge between Adobe’s Premiere Pro video editor and Flash, allowing Adobe to get a foot into the web-video market.

Dreamweaver also gets a good selection of new features. There are some general interface improvements, such as redesigned toolbars and palettes to make the program look neater, but it also has improved options for editing tables on web pages.

Additionally, you’ll have the ability to copy and paste information from Word and Excel documents straight onto a web page without losing any formatting.

But the main emphasis in Dreamweaver 8 is on cascading style sheets (CSS), with many new options to make it easier to view and edit CSS content.

The new CSS Tab displays the style rules used on a web page, and makes it easier to select and edit attributes specified by each rule. There are also improved options for checking CSS compatibility with a range of browsers so you can be sure your pages will display correctly in as many as possible.

CSS support has been improved in the Fireworks web graphics program and in the Menu Editor, which simplifies the process of creating pop-up menus and transferring them into either Flash or Dreamweaver. Fireworks also has some impressive new graphics effects, such as perspective shadows and blend modes.

Apart from the loss of Freehand, Studio 8 is a solid, well-planned upgrade.

System requirements:

• 1GHz processor
• 1GB Ram
• 2GB hard disk
• Windows 2000/XP