Washington DC – Day 94: Macromedia Studio 8
This morning I attended a workshop seminar where Macromedia showed their latest installment, Studio 8. Earlier this week, I received the e-mail invitation from my boss, Graham, and decided to register and attend it. The room was packed. There were probably more than 200 people who participated in the event. Most of them were government and NGO employees, undoubtedly working with internet technologies and web implementations for their respective institutions.
Studio 8 hasn’t been released yet, so the people attending were among the first to see Studio 8’s capabilities. It is powerful software, and even though it doesn’t include Freehand (I never use it anyway), it includes Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Flash Paper, among others. During half of the seminar, they demonstrated the new Flash improvements. It didn’t apply to me since I don’t use Flash (no animation talent), so it was kinda dull. However, once the seminar resumed after a snack break, things got interesting.
The chief software development showed us new features of Dreamweaver. It was great. The new Dreamweaver would provide more advanced support for CSS such as the ability to turn CSS on-and-off in mid-development, color each CSS box automatically, zoom in and out for more precise positioning, collapse codes for more portability, convert to XSLT for better RSS integration, and many more! It would’ve made my internship a lot easier. They also showed a new product called Flash Paper to bring web multimedia to the masses. It’s capable of converting almost any type of file into Flash SWF so the developer can show documents directly on a given web page.
After the seminar, I walked into Borders store on the opposite block, waiting for lunchtime. Surprisingly, Borders scheduled a tour appearance of Josh Kelly that afternoon for his new album, Almost Honest. It was my first tour sighting, so gotta include this in the blog. Honestly, I never heard about the guy, but his songs were very good. They’re in the same genre as Mraz, Johnson, Mayer (what do you call that genre? I always refer to it as folk music since Yahoo categorizes them that way, and there’re a lot of “J”s singers too like Josh, Jason, Jack, and John, go figure).