Macromedia Overview

Macromedia has been purchased by Adobe making one of the strongest combinations in the 2D graphics and business eLearning fields. As well through Macromedia Adobe gets a leg up in the desktop graphics container market combining PDF with Flash. The problem is that Microsoft as targetted the whole graphics market as unconquered territory.

Independently, Macromedia made almost $400M per year, 1/4 of the revenue of Adobe and 1/100th the revenue of Microsoft. Yet also like Adobe, Macromedia had disproportionate impact and mindshare on developers because of its leading presence in three marketplaces: Dreamweaver Mx leads in the market for web development tools. Flash Mx leads the market in 2D animation or more broadly now, the whole field of rich media and smart graphics. And a bevy of products from Authorware and Director Mx through Breeze to RoboDemo and Robohelp are major presences in the rapidly expanding eLearning field. Photo Finishers will be intersted in all three areas because their images are key components in everyone of these fields.

As well Macromedia has two other products that directly impact Photo Finishers. Freehand is a vector graphics tol comparable to Adobe Illustrator or Corel Draw in capabilities and Fireworks Mx is a hybrid vector and bitmap program like ACD/Deneba Canvas and Photoshop is growing to be. Fireworks is of primary interest because it often pioneers in the convergence and integration of vector and bitmap graphics - showing the directions and where the edge is heading towards. Even more intriquing is the dramatic improvements made in Freehand from

New Freehand Mx2004 - much improved

10/Mx to Mx2004. Essentially a failing franchise was turned around with a complete facelift to the UI, much greater ease of use modeled after the Fireworks and Flash interfaces, new 3D Blend and Extrude tools plus Live Effects are just a few of the improvements. Photo Finishers will like the new ability to add their bitmap images to textures and the canvas in new ways plus the range of effects, much like in Fireworks, that can be applied to their images and their boundaries. Now Macromedia may be investing a lot into Freehand to make it a respectable member of the Studio Mx package of programs. Or there may be more in store for Freehand Mx down the pike - only time will tell.

Did this in 5 minutes in Fireworks

In fact, Fireworks can deliver menus and rollover buttons to both Dreamweaver and Flash but what is really important to Photo Finishers is the fact that bitmap images can be combined with vector graphics in very interesting ways in Fireworks. In the example above, the background bitmap was originally bevelled but we backed off that and instead merged it with a vector spiral resized to exactly fill the height and tight to the left side of the flower bitmap. We then added a dropshadow with knockout so the underlying flower was revealed in spiral form. Finally, we pasted a bitmap into the text but that was too heavy so we tried a couple of styles which also were way too heavy. So then we reverted to a feathered drop shadow with knockout - Bingo! Now talk about creative inspiration getting a nice little work out. Fireworks is the place to be these days to mix and match vector with bitmap with stunning effect. Yes, Photoshop has styles but just try to paste into a vector shape with a bitmap image or tile a bitmap fill or combine text and vector shapes in novel join, punch, intersect and other combinations. You have to go to Canvas 9 to get similar integrated action.

In sum, Macromedia has been a major player and innovator in the graphics field. With Microsoft making a big push to take over a growing share of the graphics market, Adobe will need to husband and redeploy all that Macromedia expertise very carefully or potentially lose those Macromedia developers to one of their most aggressve competitors.