"The whole point is to get that picture in your head turned into a Website faster and easier." Mike Sundermeyer, one of Macromedia's lead designers, was speaking about Dreamweaver in this instance but he could well have been speaking about the whole Studio MX 2004 suite of products. And this is some suite of software ... look at what is included :

- Dreamweaver MX 2004 (which Steve reviewed last month)
- Flash MX 2004
- Fireworks MX 2004
- Freehand MX (no updated version yet)
- ColdFusion MX6.1 Developer Edition

Website development professionals need their tools, as Steve said last month, gone are the days when Notebook was the tool of choice. Quite frankly, speed is the key and integration is the answer provided by Studio MX 2004. For many years these products have been developed independently but with last year's release of the Studio MX suite we saw for the first time that hint of integration.

So whats new in Studio MX 2004? Why should we spend the money? All good questions. I loaded up the software and took a closer look at the new features I'd seen demonstrated at the Macromedia Roadshow in September.

The first thing I noticed was the speed with which I could move among the applications and the common start page and GUI are a delight. The same document tabs, coding metaphors and the common Property Inspector all reek integration. But its not all about the cosmetics ... there is now the ability to share and manipulate assets, for example, you can add flash elements to your Website with a simple drag and drop tool, element parameters can be changed via the property inspector and you can even optimise image files now without leaving DreamWeaver. Speaking of Flash, one of the new and very impressive features of Flash MX 2004 is the ability to develop SWF files faster with the Transform timeline effect to animate an object's position, scale, opacity, and tint in a few clicks of a mouse.

According to Macromedia, in Studio MX 2004 Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks have all been re-architected to improve performance in key areas, including opening and saving files, manipulating images, switching context, moving in and out of applications, streaming and run-time speed in the Macromedia Flash Player. Freehand MX has not been transformed and is the same version released last year in the Studio MX suite. However, this doesn't stop Flash and FreeHand being used together to create printed materials and web interactions.

Fireworks and Flash also have a nice working relationship going in this latest release. PNG files can now be imported directly to Flash with vectors shapes, lines and guides remaining editable. Yep, you read that correctly, remaining editable. Similarly if you want to work in Fireworks you can launch and edit a vector file and the changes will automatically be stored in Flash.

I would have to give Studio MX 2004 (even if the title is too long) a thumbs up! I guess my ongoing admiration of Macromedia is still alive. Dreamweaver's cross-browser testing, enhanced CSS and ability to edit Flash ActionScript are reason enough alone to purchase this seemlessly integrated suite of software.