Let the tech List know, this is interesting stuff.
So now does this mean flash and shockwave will become as bloated an app as adobe has made acrobat reader?
Stay tuned!
all your creative content softwares are belong to us.
I'm a very long-time Adobe user, and this can only be good. Here are my guesses where the product lines merge:
Photoshop and Illustrator remain as the pro tools. ImageReady gains from technology in Fireworks.
GoLive and Dreamweaver merge into the best web design app out there.
Fireworks and Freehand go to the corporate/home market along with PageMaker.
LiveMotion gets dumped, Flash rules, but gets better SVG support.
RoboHelp gets integrated into the PDF workflow technology. Also look for some technology sharing between PDF and Flash.
Non-competing tools like InDesign, Director and Captivate stay alone.
In freaking out over product lines, don't forget that many of Adobe's and Macromedia's products were also formerly acquisitions. Adobe got PageMaker from Aldus, and Macromedia got Freehand. Adobe acquired GoLive from GoLive (taking the company name, and original product name, for the CyberStudio product). Macromedia acquired Allaire, getting ColdFusion. Dreamweaver's programming tools came from Macromedia's acquisition of Elemental Software, getting Drumbeat (then dropping Drumbeat and angering a lot of people). Macromedia bought RoboHelp and with it Captivate from eHelp.
So this is just another integration step, and hopefully with it better software. I think Adobe/Macromedia needs this in the Web area to compete with Microsoft Visual Studio.
standard response, here and slashdot, seems to be:
by adobe users: "this is great"
by macromedia users: "this is terrible"
as a user of products from both companies i agree with both conclusions.