Brian Donovan, Senior System Engineer at Macromedia gave a seminar today in the Vancouver area on the arrival of Studio 8, the latest suite of web development tools from Macromedia, soon to become Adobe (by the end of October, according to what little could be mentioned today).
Studio 8 has many features that enhance accessibility, best practices (read web standards support), productivity and efficiency, now that there is full support in Dreamweaver for CSS including a completely rebuilt rendering engine for the design view, as well as some very nice coding enhancements for CSS. Highlights included XML and XSLT integration, and zooming in design view.
I am convinced that Macromedia should build a web browser that downloads as an automatic update to their Flash plugin to achieve instant market saturation and put to rest the nightmare of having to test against so many browser variables. Well, one can dream.
Accessibility and Search Engine Optimization for Flash are still a challenge, though Macromedia is making great strides to overcome the challenges.
SWF Metadata
A new metadata property for the SWF file format improves searchability of SWF files by Internet search engines. Now Flash authors can add a title and description to a SWF file, allowing search engines to more accurately reflect the content represented by the SWF file.
One question for which I’ve been itching to find an answer did not get answered by Brian Donovan except indirectly. The question was probably too specific: how can I find resources to figure out how to achieve a liquid layout with Flash, for example, www.trollback.com. His answer: Google.
I had thought I had made some exhaustive searches when I first came across sites such as www.trollback.com, www.joshuadavis.com, and www.burnkit.com. At that time, I came up with nothing. However, I found my answer today with this Liquid Flash Layout tutorial at www.tutorio.com.
My Studio 8 disks arrived last night. You know I’ll be trying out liquid layouts in Flash 8 with PHP, MySQL, XML and CSS integration as soon as I find the time.
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posted Tuesday September 20, 2005
Justin French at Textdrive has been busy building Strongspace as a safe place to remotely store your files, yet another Ruby on Rails application to add to the likes of Basecamp.
While he has been working with the creators of Textpattern, he has also been working on another Ruby on Rails application called TextThing, billing it as the “The CMS that does less™�.
As Justin has achieved a small victory in allowing for the ability to use several url schemes on brochure style corporate sites, TextThing may fill a need for a simple content management system that may better suit certain sites than its more blog-centric PHP-based older sibling, Textpattern.
| posted Monday September 19, 2005
The first 888 pre-orders of Macromedia Studio 8 receive free shipping and a free backpack. Mine is on order. Studio 8 is expected to ship by mid September.
Having experienced some of the pain of integrating video into Flash, I’m intrigued by the improved video support in Flash.
But the best thing, the one thing I am looking for is the ability to properly preview CSS in Dreamweaver. This I have got to see. Unfortunately, the tryout downloads are still to come, replaced instead with links to pre-order, to receive early notification, to attend a seminar, or to get more info.
One of the best quotes is from Matt:
After using the new version of Macromedia Studio 8, there’s no way I’ll go back to using other development tools. It feels as if the tools have been tailored to function exactly how I would expect a world class application to be. No more guessing how CSS will affect my site or how to incorporate XML feeds and data right off the web. Finally, something for the people more concerned with how it’s built versus how it looks.
| posted Tuesday August 9, 2005
Why not save money and trees while making your message available to an almost infinite audience? Electronic editions make this possible, but adoption of the new technologies is slow.
Find out more about publishers who are finding success and dealing with the challenges in an article at www.publish.com entitled, Electronic Editions Could Save Plenty … if Readers Switched.
| posted Monday July 25, 2005