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Macromedia Studio 8

Today, I had to perform a minor modification to a page on one of my worksites. It was a simple mistake, an English page was pointing to a Chinese language video, rather than the English.

However, it brought me back to the time some months ago, when I was converting not one, but many MPEG movies to Flash Streaming Video format. The whole process of getting the movie, converting it, creating the necessary templates, linking the whole lot together, was a really messy process.

Now that Flash video has become much more popular, I see that the forthcoming release of Macromedia Flash Professional 8 will include much better ‘out-of-the-box’ functionality for producing the video, template etc. If and when the trial version of Studio 8 is released sometime in September 2005, I’ll be most interested to see how these work out. A lot has been said about the time and effort Macromedia have put into this release, getting as much feedback and review from customers to ensure that the mess that is Studio MX2004 won’t happen again. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the trial.

In the meantime, I’ve suddenly realized how important Firefox has become in my daily work. Not so much the browser per se, but the web development extensions that have been produced for it. My favorite two are Chris Pederick’s Web Developer and Mark Guery’s HTML Validator extensions. These two alone make web development a breeze, especially for CSS and XHTML work. Things have moved on immensely over the past couple of years in terms of development, and the ease with which work can be realized.

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