Macromedia Studio 8 Now Available; Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, and Flash Player 8 Ship with New Advanced Features and Workflows

Macromedia, Inc. (Nasdaq:MACR) today announced theimmediate availability of Macromedia Studio 8, the essential suite forweb designers, developers, video professionals, and graphic artists todesign, develop, and maintain interactive online experiences.Combining the latest releases of award-winning MacromediaDreamweaver(R), Macromedia Flash(R) Professional, and MacromediaFireworks(R), and key productivity tools Macromedia Contribute(TM) andMacromedia FlashPaper(TM), Studio 8 offers a new level ofexpressiveness, efficiency, and simplified workflow to createwebsites, interactive media, and mobile content. For more informationabout Studio 8, please visithttp://www.macromedia.com/software/studio.

"Studio 8 exemplifies our continued focus on delivering the bestsolutions for communicating rich information to global audiencesacross multiple mediums," said Stephen Elop, chief executive officer,Macromedia. "With tremendous improvements to features and performance,we believe Studio 8 will fundamentally change the way people createand deliver digital content all over the world."

Studio 8 contains feature firsts, workflow enhancements, and newproducts. Studio 8 includes groundbreaking new video encoding tools,which give customers an easier method for creating and publishinghigh-quality interactive video for truly memorable online experiences.New CSS enhancements and visual authoring tools for XML add style andsophistication to websites and applications. New tools for authoringand testing mobile content give Studio 8 the market lead in helpingbusinesses reach the widest audience possible across multipleplatforms. The addition of Contribute and FlashPaper allows designersand developers a streamlined approach to maintaining web content,making the upkeep of sites created with the suite even more costeffective.

The Studio 8 suite and its individual products are key applicationcomponents of the Macromedia Flash Platform for delivering the mosteffective experiences for rich content, applications, andcommunications across browsers, operating systems, and devices.

Dreamweaver 8, available immediately, is Macromedia's latestrelease of the industry-leading tool for designing and developingwebsites and applications. New Dreamweaver 8 features include expandedCascading Style Sheet (CSS) layout visualization for easier design,drag-and-drop integration of XML data feeds, improved code hintingsupport for XML and XSLT, enhanced usability features such as zoom andcode collapse to streamline the development process, and easier waysto incorporate Flash video content onto websites.

"Dreamweaver was clearly our answer when we needed to increaseproductivity in the Web editor community and reduce technical supportfor our intranet," said Christine Mitchell, content manager, PenskeTruck Leasing. "The tight integration between Contribute andDreamweaver is seamless and enables us to keep existing productionworkflow without sacrificing time or quality. The addition ofContribute to Studio will allow others to enjoy the productivity andcost-effectiveness that we have gained with these tools."

Flash Professional 8, available immediately, marks a significantrelease for Flash, the industry's most advanced authoring environmentfor creating interactive websites, digital experiences, and mobilecontent. Improved graphics performance, new graphic effectscapabilities, new animation controls, script editor usability, Flashvideo features, and workflow integration with leading video editingand encoding tools allow the creation of rich, immersive content forthe web that was not possible before. Flash Professional 8 is theprofessional authoring environment for the Internet's most widelydistributed rich client runtime, Flash Player.

"The enhanced capabilities of Flash Professional 8 providecreative and technical advantages in developing the online presencefor Underworld: Evolution," said Michael Lebowitz, co-founder, BigSpaceship. "In the past, effects like blurs, drop shadows and glowswould have to be created in another program and imported into Flash.With Flash Professional 8, these effects can be applied directly, andin real-time, to objects and text. The results are reduced developmenttime and smaller file size."

Fireworks 8, available immediately, offers many new and improvedfeatures for optimizing images and graphics for the web. Web designersand developers can now create interactive CSS-style pop-up menus,experiment with more than 26 new blend modes, import new file formats,and experience improved roundtrip editing with Dreamweaver 8 and FlashProfessional 8.

"Using Macromedia Fireworks to design and enhance the customerexperience on Ziprealty.com, we are able to provide industry leadingonline residential real estate tools to our customers," said PatLashinsky, senior vice president, product strategy & development,ZipRealty. "Fireworks has been instrumental in helping us design ourinteractive home search tool, our comparable home sales tool, and ourcomprehensive mapping functionality, to name just a few features.ZipRealty.com is continually striving to provide the best userexperience for our consumers and we believe that Fireworks 8 willcontinue to play a key role in achieving this goal."

Flash Player 8, available immediately, is a major update to theubiquitous runtime client. Flash Player 8 includes a higher qualityvideo codec, an advanced text-rendering engine, and an improvedsecurity model and privacy controls to offer unprecedented performancein a lightweight runtime player. Flash Player is currently installedon over 600 million desktops and mobile devices globally.

PRICING AND AVAILABILITY

Macromedia Studio 8, Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, andFireworks 8 are available for immediate purchase from the MacromediaOnline Store at www.macromedia.com/store. Localized versions inGerman, French, and Japanese are expected to be available this month,and localized versions in Spanish, Italian, Korean, TraditionalChinese, and Simplified Chinese are expected to be available inOctober. Studio 8 pricing is $999 for a full license (NA commercial)and $399 for an upgrade (NA commercial). Education, government, andvolume pricing is available. To learn more about other product pricingand purchasing options, please visitwww.macromedia.com/software/studio.

ABOUT MACROMEDIA

Experience matters. Macromedia believes that great experiencesbuild great businesses. Our software empowers millions of businessusers, developers, and designers to create and deliver effective,compelling, and memorable experiences -- on the Internet, on fixedmedia, on wireless, and on digital devices.

Copyright 2005 Macromedia, Inc. All rights reserved. Macromedia,the Macromedia logo, Macromedia Contribute, Macromedia Dreamweaver,Macromedia Flash, Macromedia FlashPaper, and Macromedia Fireworks aretrademarks or registered trademarks of Macromedia, Inc., which may beregistered in the United States and internationally. Other product orservice names mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respectiveowners.