First Official Post

At long last I decided to make this site live and post my first offi­cial blog post. I wanted to take this oppor­tu­nity to explain what I want to do with this blog and the rest of the site but the news of Macromedia’s acqui­si­tion by Adobe pretty much rocked my world yes­ter­day morn­ing and that’s all I fee like talk­ing about at this time…

Like most peo­ple who were dis­cussing the news in Macromedia user forums and mail­ing lists, my first reac­tion to the news was one of shock then of fear of loos­ing two of my most used appli­ca­tions in the Studio: Fireworks and FreeHand. Since both of those apps are in direct com­pe­ti­tion with Adobe prod­ucts I’m really afraid that they’ll be killed. Even if they are not they may be kept only to die on the vine like HomeSite has been doing since the Allaire acqui­si­tion by Macromedia a few years ago.

The other thing that might hap­pen and a hot topic of dis­cus­sion amongst Macromedia users today is the pos­si­bil­ity of merg­ing Fireworks or FreeHand or both into exist­ing Adobe prod­ucts (Photoshop or ImageReady for Fireworks and Illustrator for FreeHand). I guess the future looks bleak­est for FreeHand at this point but today, I don’t have much hope for Fireworks either and it is prob­a­bly the most impor­tant Macromedia appli­ca­tion in my workflow.

I guess that Dreamweaver is not immune to either being merged with GoLive or receiv­ing a sort of GoLive treat­ment down the line and this is a scary though for me as well. The rea­son is that GoLive may be an intu­itive tool to purely visual think­ing design­ers who are used to work in print apps but Web design requires a very dif­fer­ent approach that GoLive is very ill suited to sup­port. Dreamweaver is by far the supe­rior prod­uct here as it was designed by a com­pany that truly “gets” the Web as a medium.

I know that it is way to early to spec­u­late about any­thing at this point and some other long time Macromedia users are able to keep a cooler head that me today but I can’t help but feel appre­hen­sive about the future of the tools of my craft after this trans­ac­tion is com­pleted and deci­sions about spe­cific prod­ucts are made. We’ll just have to wait and see but it hap­pens that I hate wait­ing…

Later this week I’ll post the “first” post I intended to write tonight and we’ll see where this adven­ture takes me.