Studio MX 2004 with Flash

Ive been in the computer game since I was 5, so Ive had time to try out a lot of programs. From Adobe to Apple, Macromedia to Microsoft Ive tried most of the creative suites out there. I must say that of everything Ive ever used, Studio MX 2004 is the best collection of programs youll find (and its worth the money if you can get an academic discount). I am a web designer by trade and I found every program in MX 2004 useful. Flash is the recognized standard in online animation. With this program I created in 30 minutes a navbar which exceeds those of Apple and Microsoft for usability. In five minutes I created an animated advertisement (though not a very good one). Fireworks is simply the best multipurpose image editor (photoshop is better at pure images, but not as versatile). Fireworks can do everything from having flames fly out of a friends mouth to creating web animations that reach out to those who have not downloaded Flash Player. Freehand is the least useful program in this suite. It has not changed at all since MX, so it is a bit behind in features and integration. Still, I used it for creating sketches of layouts or classic thoughtwebs. Dreamweaver! Oh, what can I say about dreamweaver! Any web designer who does not praise this program is either a hard-core pure coder, or an imposter. With this new version it becomes a 10 second matter to change the font used on every page of my websites. Rather than going through 30 pages of html, I open up one css file and type a color, or font, or size change. It is a beautiful culmination of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) technology. While most people will balk at the $999 price tag, I say look around until you find a academic copy (I got one for $199). At a $700 discount you can buy this and a new computer to serve your creations to the world. Either way I say anyone who is a job where they need to construct creative projects for the web or presentations needs to pick up a copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004.

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