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.