Adobe Macromedia Merger

[WebMasterKrames]

Has this been discussed yet?

This is a big deal for the entire graphics world. Adobe has stated that eventially they will become one company. So some softwares will obviously disappear or be merged. Freehand is already being played down a lot on the macromedia website. They have said that there will be some kind of combination between flash and pdf files. I'm not sure how I feal about that. It's probably safe to say fireworks is going away. Most people on the net seem to think GoLove will be done away with and merged into dreamweaver.

What do you think this will do to the industry?

[incrediblehelp]

Yeah this news came out a while ago. I would think help. Dreamweaver is better than Go Live, which always crashed on me. I think the main issue is with Fireworks and Photoshop. Many love the ease of use of Fireworks comparable to information overload on Photoshop. It will be interesting to see how the "get rid of" Fireworks.

[ppayne]

I beg to differ on "better." DreamWeaver and GoLive are both overkill for many people, but I use GL because it is part of the Photoshop suite. It doesn't crash, although it lacks the polish of Photoshop, certainly. There are little things I dislike about DW like not being able to drag an image over another image to replace it. I hope both programs survive. In any event, how can we have just ONE set of these programs, not two as we've had in the past?

[speed]

I used to be a fan of GoLive but at some point it became unstable and often crashes so now I use Dreamweaver to manage templates, but at the end of the day there's nothing I use from either that can't be done with a good text editor and search and replace.

Given the choice GoLive can go and I'll keep Dreamweaver. When it comes for Photoshop or Fireworks I'd like to keep both, Fireworks can be much quicker and easier for simple jobs.

[Ariana]

First of all, less competition is always a bad thing for consumers.

Additionally, Having been a long time photoshop user I prefer Fireworks to Photoshop hands down. Its just so much more user friendly for web design. I've always thought of Fireworks as a hybrid between illustrator and photoshop because it has so many more vector options than photoshop for creating shapes, lines etc that maintain their editability and scalability much better, which is more important in web design than say photo editing.

Just my opinion!

[netman4ttm]

Having bought into the CS (Creative Suite)everything from Adobe for the price of Illustrator and Photoshop I have Go Live. Even bought the "Classroom in a book" to see if it was usable. My opinion. It is useless. In the time it takes to setup the site in G0Live you can do all you need to do with Coffe Cup and PHP Designer and have the site in place and running for 3 weeks.
Macromedia is better; but what we really need is a lite version of these programs. (I was about to say a "Works" version of "Office" but even "Works" is too much).

[ADAM Web Design]

Personally, I'm worried from a purely "IT" (although I despise that term) standpoint.

Macromedia makes bloated software that sucks up a lot of resource and crashes. Flash itself is actually the 'best' of the lot that way, and I've gotten into the <Ctrl><S> habit every couple of minutes based on its behaviour.

Dr*amw*av*r is a swear word as far as I'm concerned.

And any of their other stuff has absolutely no use for me personally.

As far as Adobe is concerned, Photoshop runs heavy, Illustrator runs even heavier, Acrobat is a serious RAMwhore and GoLive...well, enough people have covered that one.

So...we're going to take bloated, memory-hungry software, and merge it with bloated, memory-hungry software. Unfortunately, that means even more bloated, memory-hungry software. And that's bad.

[WebMasterKrames]

Dr*amw*av*r is a swear word as far as I'm concerned.

Why do you despise it so?

[ADAM Web Design]

Dr*amw*av*r is a swear word as far as I'm concerned.

Why do you despise it so?

Well, it's only partly the product. It's partly the legion of Macrowhores (my word) running around thinking it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

But it's also:

Bloated code generation.

WYSIWYG editor.

Inability for anyone that doesn't have the program to make the most minor adjustments by hand.

That stupid mouseover Javascript that should be in its own file.

Unstability.

The number of people that think it's stunningly easy to create a website and that don't understand why we take a while to do certain things becaues "it's all just point and click now, isn't it?"

Other than that, no reason. :)

[Bohak]

I personally think that Macromedia is the better of the two. Photoshop is pretty much the only thing Adobe has that Macromedia cant touch. Flash is genius. I use Flash instead of Freehand or Illustrator to build icons and logos because its 10x faster. Illustrator or Freehand, to my knowledge is the only way to put text on a curve or circle, but other than that, I just use Flash now. Programmers hate Dreamweaver, and I can understand why but...I dig it. Adobe mainly seems to focus on the needs of Graphic Designers/Print/raster graphics, where as Macromedia covers the entire gamut, but graphic wise its all vector. Im worried that Photoshop is gonna make the interfaces too graphic heavy or slow them down. All Macromedia programs I have used open up 10x faster than any Adobe programs.

It would be cool to have a Photoshop/Dreamweaver/Pagemaker program for us Newspaper publishers.

Or a Flash/Photoshop that could vectorize a raster graphic the same way Flash does.