So its finally official, as of Dec 5th 2005 Adobe now formally owns Macromedia. Now the whole web development community seems to be in uproar with rumors flying left and right as to what is going to happen to some of the flagship products of Macromedia. I have personally been a fan of Macromedia from way back in the day. My first contact with the company came when a friend told me about Dreamweaver 2, and how the product was cool and very easy to use. At that time i was just getting into web development and the only tools I had at my disposal were notepad and FrontPage.. Suffice to say that was the last time I used any of those products. I do break away once in a while to write some code in notepad tho :0. Its fun to code by hand, but when it comes to tight development schedules and rapid prototyping and development Dreamweaver has always done the trick for me. Which brings me back to the impact of this merger. I am not really sure what is going to happen with a lot of the Macromedia software.. I assume that Flash being a major flagship of the company and being so pervasive now on the net would not be discarded but will be integrated into the Adobe stable. I can’t say much for some of the other Macromedia products like Fireworks, and Freehand which haven’t really made much of an impact in the market. I plan to get together a list of all the products and make a side by side analysis of which ones ( i feel ) are most likely going to stay and which ones probably won’t.
