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Article Index
Review: Macromedia (Adobe) Studio 8
Flash 8
Fireworks/Contribute/FlashPaper
Conclusion
All Pages

Conclusion
With a retail price of just under $1000 Studio 8 will be out of reach for most, except for 'prosumer' end users, but then again with the inclusion of Contribute Macromedia is aiming squarely at the small/medium sized business market. Also, while a grand is a lot whichever way you look at it, Studio 8 is still cheaper than buying Dreamweaver 8 and Flash 8 Pro separately - the two main applications that will be of interest to most designers.

One minor concern was that Studio was going the same way of Office - bloatware. Dreamweaver now takes nearly 13 seconds to open from a freshly booted/freshly reinstalled P4 3GHz/1GB RAM PC and Flash 8 taking just over 20. If you're in and out of apps all day this won't matter too much as cacheing reduced it down by 75% most of the time, but even so it can be a little frustrating first off. Macromedia can, however be applauded for beta-testing their applications well. In extensive tests with large, complex files (especially in Flash) none of them failed, and bugs from previous versions seem to have been addressed.

Individually the applications are all strong, but for businesses that will use the entire suite Studio 8 becomes greater than then sum of its parts.