Studio 8 > Macromedia’s latest showcase
With the latest releases of Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Fireworks, Contribute and FlashPaper, Studio 8 offers web designers and developers a new level of expressiveness, efficiency and simplified workflow to create websites, interactive experiences and mobile content.
Hurray. This is has been a long time coming for Macromedia fans, especially since the buy out of Macromedia by Adobe. A lot of web industry folk wondered what the destiny was for the highly regarded Macromedia suite of web programs. I am very happy to see a whole new array of upgrades across the board and not having to live without Fireworks. (Which I was sure would be replaced with Adobe Image Ready.)
Dreamweaver is my main interest in the studio family as I have worked with this software for over 6 years, and since adopting the css and standards approach I have longed for Macromedia to catch up on some of these really important aspects of how websites are now being developed. I quickly flicked through the tour to see what new features Macromedia had implemented to make Dreamweaver 8 a worthy upgrade…
Code collapse & Coding toolbar
I am so happy to say that Macromedia have now realized that even designers use the code window and have employed this really neat Code Collapse function to essentially minimize snippets of code. You can even hover over these minimized snippets and it shows a tool tip preview of what it contains. This is great for working on complex sites which may have a lot of nested elements.
The new coding toolbar put some previously existent functionality at your fingertips and also adds some new ones such as “apply comment” and “remove comment”.
New, unified CSS panel & CSS layout visualization
The new css panel looks pretty cool from the small preview they show you in the feature tour. From what I saw you can click elements in design view and it highlights the associated css with that element and has a properties sub panel for quick editing. I wish there was a bit more on information on this panel, but it’s only a preview.
The css layout visualization is something I use to get from Firefox development toolbar. (not to say that I won’t be using that because it’s invaluable for studying live websites. 
) This is a great in house tool to have in your development environment. It’s a set of tools that allows you to turn on layer (div) outlines, backgrounds, box model and
Accessibility: Support for WCAG/W3C priority 2 checkpoints
Exactly what is says on the label! You can generate accessibility reports and also edit the level of conformity in the settings located under reports.
There’s more to say on the new version of Dreamweaver but I suggest you take a look at the site yourself and read up on the parts that interest you the most. The ones I mention are my favorites. Here is a direct link to the product page:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/
All in all I think Dreamweaver 8 will be a worthwhile upgrade. It may seem like there aren’t oodles of new features, but I don’t think that is what was needed. I believe that the qualitive new features that surround css, accessibility and the workflow are a huge step in making my life easier as a web standards designer.
Fingers crossed I will feel as satisfied as I hope once I get my mits on Dreamweaver8. 
