Fireworks 8 has a lot of small tweaks, changes and updates that to me, aren't necessarily big enough for a dedicated feature - so for today's FOTD I wanted to cover a bunch of small tweaks that collectively make for a much, much more flexible imaging tool. There's a lot to cover (and this post won't even get close to covering them all), so let's get started!
I do a lot of asset generation in Fireworks, and often these assets are headed towards Flash. In Studio MX 2004, there were a few hitches in that workflow, primarily in that any blend modes and effects needed to be rasterized, and vector paths from Fireworks always showed up in Flash as grouped objects. If you follow a similar workflow, you'll be glad to hear that things have shored up here quite a bit in Flash 8.
Although Dreamweaver MX 2004 made signficant improvements to the way CSS styles were handled in development, there were still some parts of the overall CSS workflow that were a bit awkward. In order to get the most mileage out of Dreamweaver with CSS layouts, you needed to devote a whopping amount of real-estate to the associated panels- CSS Styles and Relevant CSS. And unfortunately, the former panel was buried within the 'Design' panel set, and the latter wasn't even listed in the Window menu! Dreamweaver 8 to the rescue- both panels have been combined into a single, unified CSS panel that serves as a centralized control panel for working with CSS layouts. Shall we explore?
In case you didn't notice, several new sessions were recently added to the MAX track schedule based on popular demand (for example, I'll be presenting on Flash Video and Dreamweaver). You can find more details at the MAX home page linked below- note that today (8/26/05) is the last day you can register at a $200 discount:
In Tuesday's FOTD we looked at some key updates to strokes in Flash 8, and today we're going to look at some similar (and equally helpful) updates to gradients that will give you a lot more options in your fills. Let's dive a little deeper.
Fireworks 8 got some very nice updates this release, and several of them are in the form of new SWF-based panels that either extend, or consolidate groups of functionality in Fireworks around key tasks. Today I'm going to shine a flashlight on the new Image Editing Panel in Fireworks 8- which is basically a handy centralized location for all the functions you'll need the most when editing digital photos, design comps and other bitmap images. Let's take a look.
Flash has made some significant strides to become more expressive with version 8, and both today and Friday's FOTD will look at two specific features in this category- todays focus on updates to Strokes that should make Flash 8 much more flexible in the design department.
(Note- these enhanced stroke features are only available when publishing to Flash Player 8.)
This will definitely be a quicker FOTD post than Friday's- but for those on the Mac platform, quite likely a long-awaited one. Tabbed documents are now available on OS X, in both Dreamweaver 8 and Flash 8! That's right- it's not a Windows-only UI convention anymore- and should help out immensely in managing your Dreamweaver and Flash workspaces.
This feature of Flash 8 is a personal favorite of mine- as I've never been a fan of 'percentage-based' easing when animating in Flash, and always wished I had a more control than just a '10% ease-out' or a '5% ease-in' in Flash MX 2004 and earlier. Patience pays off, however- Flash 8 features a new Custom Easing panel that, to be quite blunt, rocks quite hard indeed.
If you're interested in learning more about mobile Flash development with the Flash Lite 1.1 CDK and the new mobile authoring features in Flash Professional 8, then you'll want to catch this online seminars Wednesday (8/24) from either 9AM - 10:30AM EST, or 9PM - 10:30PM EST. All attendees will have the chance to win a free copy of Flash Professional 8, so run - don't walk, they're filling up fast - to the registration URL and get a seat:
http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=127144
The 90-minute seminar(s) will be held via Breeze live, so you'll only need a computer with a current browser and the Flash Player installed, and a live network connection to attend. Voice will be provided via VoIP (thru Breeze), or an alternate phone connection for the bandwidth-challenged. ;-)
Dreamweaver is becoming much more friendly to hand-coders these days- with v8 introducing a new Coder’s Toolbar that runs vertically along the left of your document window in Code View. Sure, toolbars like this have been a staple of many other code-centric editors for some time, but given a large theme of the Studio 8 release has been expressiveness and workflow improvement, it makes sense for Dreamweaver to start shoring up gaps in this respect. Let's take a look.
Sometimes small updates can be important ones to note. Have you ever just wanted to open an image up in Fireworks and save it out as another format? If so, you've noted this requires an export step in earlier versions of Fireworks- not particularly intuitive for those familiar with other image-editing applications. In Fireworks 8, however, you can simply open an image and select "File > Save As..."?, choose from the variety of export filetypes that Fireworks supports, and you’re done converting the format. Sure, this isn’t exactly a huge new feature, but for adding more options to your image editing workflow, it could be a timesaver nonetheless- and a great example of the strong focus on expanded/improved workflow in Studio 8.
I know I already posted a FOTD today- so consider this a bonus. Simply put- in Flash 8 you can select, as a global preference, either document-level undo (introduced in MX 2004) as well as good 'ol object-level undo. If you preferred the old Flash MX (and earlier) style, where there was an undo queue maintained for each symbol, well- it's back (object-level undo). If you got comfortable with the newer Flash MX 2004 style of document-level undos - well, it's still there too. Preferences > General Tab is where the pref is located now- pick one and run, y'all. Tres cool.
Want to see a live demo of Studio 8? If so (and you're in the North America and/or Asia/Pacific regions), you'll want to check out the Studio 8 launch seminar schedule for a city near you on the tour:
These 3-hour launch seminars are a great opportunity to get a first-hand peek at the new Studio products before they start shipping- so if you're located in either geographic region, definitely check it out!
If you've got some free time to sharpen your skillsets a bit, there are two free public Macrochats on Verity in ColdFusion MX 7 (tomorrow) and Flash Video bandwidth detection and scaling (next Tuesday) coming up you might want to catch. Note: pre-registration is required for both, links to follow.
If you'd like to browse the archive of previously-recorded Macrochats, make sure to bookmark this URL for future reference, too:
http://www.macromedia.com/community/macrochats.html
Although Flash old-timers have undoubtedly become comfortable with the way Flash handles object drawing on the stage - strokes and fills as separate entities, having objects ‘cut away’ from one another when drawing overlapping shapes, etc - Flash 8 now supports both the traditional Flash object drawing mode (now dubbed 'Merge' mode) and a more Freehand/Illustrator behavior familiar to vector designers ('Object' mode) that treats objects more like traditional vector applications- fill and stroke acting as a single object when moving or transforming, and no ‘cutting out’ of objects behind other objects on the same layer.
How many times have you been working a CSS-driven design and had to strain at your monitor from inches away to resolve those 1-3 pixel shifts? With Dreamweaver 8, you can zoom in on the area of your page in question and make your changes easily. Or, zoom out of a large, complex page design to get a better view of your layout without scrollbars. With the new Guides feature, you can also now drag guide marks out just like in your favorite image editing application, to help visualize alignment and placement better (and guides even carry through to Dreamweaver templates!). Save the Lasik surgery for when it’s really needed, get your designs laser-accurate right now. Here's the scoop.
In Flash MX 2004, the 'Normal' mode for Actionscript was removed in favor of behaviors, and the Flash community arose to let the Flash team know how exactly much it was missed. And they listened. Now, I can’t say that Normal Mode is back, per se- but I can say that Flash 8's Script Assist feature is a logical evolution of Normal Mode (in my opinion) you'll find welcome if you missed the functionality last time around.
If you're a seasoned Dreamweaver user, you've undoubtedly encountered more than a few file transfer-related roadblocks when uploading/downloading large batches of files, checking in/checking out en masse, synchronizing sites, and so on. Once you started a file transfer in DWMX 2004 or earlier, you were essentially locked out of Dreamweaver until all the files had been transferred- essentially stuck twirling your thumbs as the progress bar made that tedious left-to-right march. Well, as you probably already guessed from the title of this post, file transfers are now a background task in Dreamweaver 8.
One of the most popular features in previous versions of Fireworks had to be the pop-up menu generator. However, despite being handy and popular, these menus had a lot of inherent problems that became evident over time (not search engine friendly/indexable, difficult to customize after the fact, maintained links in JS files, etc.). The new CSS Popup Menus feature in Fireworks 8 is a much different story, however- much more robust than any prior 'stock' pop-up menu features in Fireworks or Dreamweaver (although I still recommend learning the basics of menu generation yourself as well- visual tools are great, but understanding the underlying principles is a skill worth cultivating). Here’s the basic rundown for creating pop-up menus in Fireworks 8.
In Flash MX 2004, you had few options for importing Flash Video with fine control - unless you were already working in a third-party video editor or compositing tool that could take advantage of the direct export functionality from those applications. And for those new to video in general, not to mention Flash Video- understanding all the embedding/streaming/progressive download options and their repercussions to a project were even more daunting. Well, in Flash 8- FLV import (and conversion) just got a whole lot easier. I’ll step you through it in text/image form (and for a richer Captivate walkthru- make sure to check out Greg Rewis' simulation here as well)- and let us know what you think!
This is the first of my Studio 8 'Features of the Day', I'll be posting these each weekday until Studio 8 ships, and the first is on Dreamweaver's long-awaited new feature- Code Collapse.
When working in complex code blocks, have you ever wished you could hide sections you aren't working on to make navigation a little easier? With Dreamweaver 8's code collapse feature, you can collapse any tag, function or block- saving valuable scrolling time and most importantly... your sanity.
Using Code Collapse is a snap- just select any fragment of code in Code view, and you'll see two 'triangle' markers in the gutter by the line numbers- just click one of them and your entire section rolls up out of view quickly, saving precious real-estate. If you're not a mouse-clicker, the keyboard shortcuts Control-Shift-C (Win) or Command-Shift-C (Mac) collapse your selection, and Control-Shift-E (Win) or Command-Shift-E (Mac) expand a collapsed selection. Here's a quick before/after shot of code collapse in practice- make sure to check out Greg Rewis' blog post here for a Captivate simulation of Code Collapse in action as well (Greg and I will be tag-teaming some of these daily posts for a richer description of the new features in Studio 8, so heads-up!).
So what if you'd like to maintain your selection, but hide/collapse everything else? Control-Alt-C/Control-Alt-E (Win) and Command-Option-C/Command-Option-E (Mac) will correspondingly collapse and expand everything outside your selection. And if you don't have time to make a full selection, but want to collapse the tag your cursor's currently within- either select 'Collapse Full Tag...' from the 'Edit > Code Collapse' menu, or just hit Control-Shift-J (Win) or Command-Shift-J (Mac). You can also achieve the inverse - collapsing all the code outside the tag/function your cursor's currently within - by hitting Control-Alt-J (Win) or Command-Option-J (Mac).
Flexible and powerful, once you've embraced code collapse there's no reason to get buried in your own code anymore- unless you want to, of course.
That's right- Studio 8 has just been announced and I, for one, am really excited to see this release get out the door and into everyone's hands shortly. It's a big update, so I'd recommend kicking off your infosurfing at the Studio 8 product site (http://www.macromedia.com/software/studio/), and then following the links from there to more detail in the respective Studio 8 product sections (Flash 8, Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3 and Flash Paper 2).
Now once you've read through all the shiny new features and updates- you'll want to get the official dirt on Studio 8 and it's development process right from the source- each of the Studio product managers have published articles on the new features in their respective products, with a peek into the overall development process courtesy of Jim Guerard, our VP of product management/marketing for Studio.
Also, to help shine some light on some of the new and updated functionality you can expect in Studio 8, I'll start publishing a single Studio product feature each weekday here on my weblog, counting down to the day Studio 8 starts shipping out. The first of these 'featurelets' will go out later today, so keep posted...
If you're using either the WA eCommerce Suite or WA eCart Dreamweaver extensions from WebAssist, and have built a slick shopping cart with either product, you'll definitely want to enter it into their 'Pimp My Cart' contest- top prize is a 60GB color iPod and $500 worth of software, with three runner-up prices of $300 worth of software. If your online store fits the requirements, hit that link and sign it up!
It's time again- the 2005 MAX awards, to be presented at the MAX '05 conference in Anaheim this year. But before your stellar online experience can win, you've got to submit it for consideration- which can be done here:
http://www.macromedia.com/bin/max2005award.cgi
The award categories this year are:
...and of course, the People's Choice winner, selected from the finalists by all of the conference attendees. You've got until September 9th, 2005 to enter your submissions (and although the awards will be presented at the conference October 16-18, they'll be announced on October 3rd), so get them keyboards rattling and submit your masterpieces for consideration!
