Studio 8 Has Arrived
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