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the merger between Adobe and Macromedia announced in April, 2005, was finalized in early December, but it was still unclear at press time which products would survive the merger and in what form. Right after the merger was completed, Adobe began offering a bizarre combination Studio and Creative Suite 2 bundle for $1,899 on the Adobe.com Web site, a move that is sure to confuse consumers wondering why they'd need both GoLive and Dreamweaver. The dust will undoubtedly settle in the coming months, but for now, you can at least take heart as a manager with difficult purchase decisions to make that Studio, once Macromedia's premiere software bundle, is alive and kicking under the Adobe banner. Hash and Dreamweaver remain in a class by themselves and are still very available.
The release of Studio 8 certainly doesn't represent a major change to the look and feel of the suite, as was the case with the release of Studio MX several years ago, but some products have been moved into the suite that had previously been sold separately, and at least one product has been removed. Overall, there are lots of incremental changes that add up to value. You will need to base your upgrade decision on several factors including the last time you upgraded and whether you want to wait and see where the chips fall in the merger. One thing you can be sure of is that Macromedia's final release of Studio still offers the same quality Web development products it offered before being absorbed by Adobe.
WHAT'S IN THE STUDIO?
Studio has some changes in this year's model. In addition to veterans Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, and Fireworks 8, Macromedia made the wise move of including Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2. This provides a more complete workflow for your staff because Contribute provides a way for non-technical end users to update their Web sites without altering the underlying design, while freeing up the valuable Web development team from undertaking minor edits and changes better suited to the content contributors. FlashPaper, meanwhile, provides a way to embed documents, such as Microsoft Office documents, into Web pages, which load faster than Adobe PDFs. (FlashPaper...