Gadgetopia

Macromedia: Macromedia's old Web site isn't what it using to be. It's been "Adobe-ized," complete with the Adobe logo appended with "formerly Macromedia." Looks like they're going to try to bury the Macromedia name completely. Adobe Dreamweaver, anyone? I don't much care, so long as GoLive dies.

Macromedia Labs Homepage: Lots of stuff here about Flex, and even something on FlashPlayer 8.5. Macromedia Labs is your source for early looks at emerging products and technologies from Macromedia. In Labs, you'll find early access to downloads, samples, documentation, release notes, tutorials and more.

Macromedia - Breeze: Nice product. It converts PowerPoint to slick Flash presentations. There's a good demo on the site, and a showcase with some third-party presentations. And here's a good review of the product. Macromedia sells the software as shrinkwrap or hosted. Sadly, no pricing in available without a quote ...

Macromedia - Macromedia Central: I think this has the potential to be huge. Macromedia Central is a single user interface (code-named "Halo") into which Flash and Shockwave applications can be "plugged." If you write an app, you can include an XML file that explains how it's to be paid for, ...

Macromedia - Flex: As near as I can tell, Flex is a programming framework for Flash. Macromedia Flex (previously code-named Royale) extends the Macromedia MX platform by delivering a standards-based programming methodology for building the presentation tier of Rich Internet Applications. There's even a markup language MXML: Macromedia FLex Markup ...

Macromedia lends helping hand: I didn't catch this before: Macromedia bought eHelp, makers of RoboHelp (somewhere in Sioux Falls, Rob just curled up into a fetal position). Software maker Macromedia on Tuesday released the first product to emerge from its acquisition of eHelp, a specialist in tools for creating online ...

Flash steps out of the browser: We talked about this six months ago when it was first announced. Good to hear it's come to fruition. "Software maker Macromedia on Wednesday released a test version of Central, a new add-on for its widespread Flash animation format that's intended to make Internet ...

Adobe to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion: Oh my goodness. My mind reels at the ramifications of this. Adobe instantly bought their way into a ton of markets. Computer document company Adobe Systems Inc. said Monday it agreed to buy multimedia software firm Macromedia Inc. for about $3.4 billion in ...

Spectrasource: Macromedia has put Spectra into open-source. What is Spectra? "Spectra is an application framework that helps organizations build and manage large-scale content management and e-commerce solutions that deliver rich, personalized customer and visitor experiences. It incorporates features such as content management, workflow and process automation, roles-based security, personalization, and ...

Some very interesting news out of Macromedia this morning. They plan to release a lightweight Web editing tool called Contribute that's geared for non-Web developers that need to make changes to Web pages. I'm interested in the possibilities this could open up for the workplace. I'm involved in using content ...

Macromedia drops FreeHand from bundle: Please, oh please, let GoLive be next. FreeHand, Macromedia's popular illustration tool, has been omitted from the company's upcoming developer suite, dubbed Studio 8. Macromedia executives cited "extensive research with our customers" as the reason behind the decision, and not its impending acquisition by Adobe ...

Macromedia tests new Flash Player: Flash Player 7 is on the radar. "The new version of the Flash Player, available for download from Macromedia, concentrates on performance improvements that allow the software to process some types of Flash content as much as 10 times faster, said Lucian Beebe, Macromedia's product ...

Macromedia - Contribute: Macromedia just announced "Contribute 2." Changes are very small: better connection functionality, secure FTP, online store plug-in, etc.

Macromedia - Contribute: Contribute 3 is out. Macromedia claims "300 enhancements," but I can't find a list. There's an impressive list of features here, but it doesn't break out what's new in this version. I did see some neat stuff that I hadn't seen before, like FrontPage Extension compatibility, WEBDAV ...

In a Flash, cell phones could be dynamic: The new OS (or maybe just the presentation layer) for cell phones? Macromedia Flash. The company has Flash on phones in Japan with carriers NTT DoCoMo and KDDI, plus manufacturers who work with Vodafone KK. Macromedia just made deals with No. 1 ...

There's a class of product that fits into a crappy pricing slot. It's a slot where a purchaser isn't going to make a purchase right away, because they're going to have a lot of questions. But at the same time, individual sales of the product aren't expensive enough for the ...

Vnc2swf: Now here's one for the cool ideas bin: Recently Macromedia Flash(TM) is becoming a kind of de facto standard of animation distribution format. Vnc2swf is a recording tool for VNC, a protocol to manipulate remote window systems via network, developed by AT&T Laboratories Cambridge. It records VNC sessions and ...

Morphing Blogs to Business: This guy has evidently had a lot of time on his hands since selling Allaire to Macromedia. Imagine firmware updates via RSS. "Jeremy Allaire, technologist in residence at General Catalyst Partners LLC, in Cambridge, Mass., and former chief technology officer at Macromedia Inc., has drafted ...

Eolas says it would settle over IE 'In response to newly revealed details of Microsoft's potential plans to redesign its browser, Eolas founder Mike Doyle urged the software giant to leave Internet Explorer alone and pay his company a license fee instead." Further down in this article, it mentions that ...

Microsoft to Automate 'Avalon' Coding With 'Sparkle': What a lot of people don't remember is that when Flash came out, back when it was called FutreSplash, Microsoft saw the writing on the wall and tried to shut down Flash before it started with something called LiquidMotion. It died hard and ...

Yes! Fontographer, Macromedia's long time orphaned child, has been snatched up by FontLab, who is promising renewed support for the product and an update that will run natively in OS X. With nearly two decades of presence on the market, Fontographer has gained a reputation as an easy-to-use and reliable ...

Transformation of Flash to XML and XML to Flash: How long before Macromedia sues? "Our processing engine can decompile SWF to RVML and compile RVML back into native SWF format. All resources, whether ActionScript, sound, video, or images can be extracted and inserted, SWF files can be viewed and manipulated ...

Macromedia FlashPaper: A very cool use of Flash. With FlashPaper, you can "print" a document to SWF format, retaining all the formatting (just like PDF). However, unlike PDF, you can embed it in a Web page in its own little frame, instead of having it be its own document and ...

Interesting things are happening at UserLand. John Robb has left, and Dave Winer is hinting that big changes are coming. Two theories abound: (1) they will open source some or all (Frontier, Manila, Radio) of their products, or (2) they will be acquired. With Google's purchase of Blogger some months ...

The Tarquin Engine: This is pretty interesting. The Tarquin Engine is a tool for the creation and delivery of zooming infinite canvas webcomics. In it's current form it exists as a series of Action Script routines within a Macromedia Flash FLA file. It also you to build cartoons like this ...

Macromedia - Dreamweaver 8: The new version of Dreamweaver is out, and it includes this snazzy feature: Simply point a web page to an XML file or a URL of an XML feed and Dreamweaver will introspect it to enable dragging and dropping the appropriate fields onto the page. There's ...

FlashCharts v2.0: Seemingly very cool app that lets you dynamically create Flash charts for your Web-based app. FlashCharts v2.0 generates bar charts, line charts, pie charts, and a stock chart. It generates all the graphics in the client computer using Macromedia's Flash technology, taking the load off your servers and ...

Learn to Create Dynamic Web Pages in Less Than an Hour: Neat little Flash demo on using ColdFusion Components in DreamWeaver MX. It shows the tight integration resulting from the Macromedia and Allaire merger a couple years back. Another note: initially, I thought the article was lame because it was ...

Adobe Acrobat Reader upgrades, adds new tricks: This sounds like bloat, what what did we expect? Acrobat and Flash together have more saturation than any other software -- even Windows, I'd guess. When you have that kind of distribution network, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Acrobat 8, ...

Laszlo Systems: I always get a sinking feeling when I write about something cool done with Flash, but this one is too good to pass up. Laszlo lets you build server-based Flash apps from an XML document. You code in an XML flavor called "Laszlo Application Language" and the Laszlo ...

Macromedia - ColdFusion Support Forums - Cold Fusion/SQL Server programmer needed: I agree with just about everything here: Please DON'T respond [...] If we have a tense moment or we say that we don't like the way you did some work and that it's not absolutely perfect and you're not ...

Open Source: Open Source Scripting Made Easy: This is an article about PHP scripting tools that makes an important point: Commercial scripting languages have drawn success from powerful and widely used development tools: ASP has Visual Studio, ColdFusion has Macromedia's Dreamweaver, and JSP has a variety of tools from commercial ...

GPLFlash - Flash decoder, player and plugin: Someone pointed this out in a comment to my previous post from today. This is the homepage of the redesigned GPLFlash. GPLFlash is based on Olivier Debon's original work, which hasn't had a release since June 2000. This project is an endeavour to ...

I'm trying to find a good deal on Dreamweaver MX 2004, since I don't want to drop $400 on it (I'm cheap). I head over to eBay to see what I can find, and see lots of dealls for $200 - $300. However, every single one of these deals is ...

So it's 2000, and you're happily writing your web apps in ColdFusion. Then Allaire is bought out by Macromedia, the Sun sales rep drops by and takes your IT director to lunch, and now things are migrating to Java, your IT director has a snazzy leather jacket, and you're stuck ...

mozile: index: I installed this, and at first glance, it looks as cool as it sounds. "Mozile or Mozilla Inline Editor is an in-browser, context-sensitive, XHTML editor that allows a user to edit all or just specific editable sections of any XHTML page from the comfort of his own browser. ...

Flash Vs. CSS/HTML: Which Will You Choose?: I hate Flash. What I hate even more is when someone presents a well-reasoned argument for why it beats HTML. "Remember my original statement, 'HTML and CSS will never be able to do what Flash does'? While this is true, it’s quite possible ...

Is it time to put the P tag to rest? It does the exact same thing as a DIV, but it adds spacing below the tag by default. Essentially, you could have a DIV and a style rule of DIV { margin-bottom: 10px; } and it would do the exact ...

I suddenly have this drive to mess around with every obscure piece of content management and Web scripting software I can find. In this vein, I set up ColdFusion Express 4.5 tonight. This is a stripped down version of ColdFusion that Allaire (now Macromedia) offered for free for a while. ...

I'm interested in finding a nice, lightweight, WYSIWYG HTML editor for use by non-developers. In this scenario, as I'm sure you know, is not havig too little functionality, but having too much. I haven't found one yet that I'm comfortable unleashing on non-developer content editors. How about FrontPage or Dreamweaver, ...