Macromedia Studio MX-Mac Upgrade from 2+ Macromedia product

List Price: $499.99 Discount Price: $199.00

Customer Reviews:

Too Good To Be Called an "Upgrade..." [Posted on 2002-06-18]
MacroMedia has exceeded expectations with Studio MX! The newest items -- DreamWeaver MX, FireWorks MX, and Flash MX -- have been renovated to feature a much more consistent, intuitive user experience, slick graphical interface (at least under Mac OSX), and expanded capabilities and features.

So much has been added in features and experience that to call this a mere 'upgrade' is short changing the work done here. DW features all of the features from UltraDev, plus support for the free PHP, demonstrating their renewed confidence in the power of ColdFusion (dev version included w/Windows version of Studio MX), not to mention added support for ASP.NET. Those who loved Allaire's HomeSite will appreciate its integreation into the DW interface itself.

FireWorks is a beautiful application that makes PhotoShop pros feel more at home without feeling like they're using a 2nd rate knock off (like older versions of FW). Creating interacive images is much easier than ever -- some of this stuff you can just 'figure out', perhaps with a bit of guidance from the extensive online help system.

Flash: Wow! It has no competition now, and its intergration with FH10 is fabulous. These two pieces alone make for the most powerful vector-based dev environment on the planet. Crucial, considering the exodus from Raster/bit map images on the web.

Bravo MacroMedia! This stuff is so good, I have no idea what you'll do next! (But, please, may I suggest ColdFusion MX for Mac OSX?)

Very buggy software, but does the job [Posted on 2002-07-06]
Another half-baked update. Macromedia really needs to go back to the drawing board and put out some maintenance updates. On the good side, we have OS X versions of these web design mainstay apps (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash); on the bad side, they are so buggy that one wonders if OS 9 was really that bad at all. Overall, DW on my G4/733 feels slower than 4.01 did on a G3/333.

For example, the behavior of dragging the panels on the right side is very inconsistant. E.g., when attempting to resize the CSS panel to be longer to show more styles in my file, the cursor often does not turn into the double-headed arrow to indicate dragability; or the cursor disappears completely; dragging sometimes works, but more often doesn't. Or, when in code view, dragging across text to select results in a nasty redraw problem, with the code flashing on and off in rapid succession until you've stopped dragging. It's like the document is having an epilectic seizure.

And why haven't they put in a simple window split function? BBEdit has had this for years. They boast about how bit-chin' their HTML code view is, but jeeze, it leaves a lot to be desired (and no, I don't think switching to BBEdit should be a solution to that; I think Macromedia should do more than a half-baked job on the code editor, and then most of us wouln't need to bother with BBEdit). Additionally, some of the other bugs were extant in version 4.01. Some things in 4.01 were slow as heck (templates). What I'm seeing so far in MX doesn't bode well.  

If I could give 0 stars I would. [Posted on 2003-02-25]
No one running Mac OS X should buy this product until the bugs are worked out.

Some of the more annoying Fireworks MX bugs:

Eyedropper - when selecting a color, selects the inverse of that color, so you have to select the color, then select it again to get the correct color.

Crop - If you set up your canvas to delete objects when cropping and then crop your document, it won't delete objects.

Text - You cannot copy and/or paste text into or out of the program

Those are all I can think of right now... but these are not all the bugs, I run into more and more every day.

DO NOT BUY THIS PROGRAM. It's not worth it.

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