All returned search results now have a corresponding RSS page. Great for digg data miners or anyone that wants live keyword-based RSS search results.

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Finally a fool-proof guide to the Matrix Movie and how it can be conveyed as a ‘Messiah’ film. This site presents the parallels between Neo’s life story and the life story of Christ some 2,000 years ago!

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You are now able to purchase Macromedia Studio 8 for direct download or trial evaluations. Congratulations Macromedia! Get it now: http://www.macromedia.com/downloads/

I was fortunate enough to attend the Macromedia Studio 8 launch in my home town of Perth, yesterday. The seminar was held at the Hyatt Regency in some Trafalgar room. About 50-70 odd people rocked up including Perth’s creative and enthusiastic designers and the boring single-minded developers (me included). The seminar took a little over 2 hours and mainly covered the latest version of Flash for the designers and Dreamweaver for us Developers. Studio 8 was launched on the 8th of the 8th month (August) at 8am, San Fransisco time (pun intended). This equates to about 1.30am or pm – I cant remember for us here in Perth. Who really cares anyway? The marketing team have decided to drop the MX naming scheme for this release and rather emphaise the number eight (8).

Right from the word go it was obvious that Macromedia had spent an enormous amount of effort improving the feature set, reducing wait times and refining the user interface. Our presenter for flash was so impressed by the new feature set that he struggled to control his excitement. I’ll cover the key points, but seeing there are so many changes I strongly suggest a visit to the Macromedia website.

With every new version of Studio, the flash player also gets an upgrade hence Flash Player 8. The latest Flash player is amazing with hugely impressive speed increases, most notably on MacOS. We were shown CPU intensive tasks such as fractacals, 3D motion and real time video effects. Oh and by the way VIDEOS NOW GET AN ALPHA CHANNEL (I sound like the Flash presenter)!!! This opens the possibility to create incredible interactive media without additional filesizes as it is rendered in real-time by the flash player. Other enhancements include an engine to nicely render fonts, several filters (most likely stolen from Photoshop, more on that later) and a cool new feature to facilitate complete control over motion tweens. The examples and demos we were provided with were certainly the best demonstrations to showcase Flash’s new feature set.

Dreamweaver also got a massive overhaul. Macromedia actually took the time to consider us coders (we’ve got our own toolbar now for the code view). We now can enjoy features such as code collapsion (the biggie) and common-coding task shortcuts. Dreamweaver also now sports background FTP. Previously we were succumbed to waiting whilst Dreamweaver took center stage and impressed us with progessive uploading screens. Unfortunately we no longer get that avid coffee break which ironically extended itself to an hour away from the desk whilst Dreamweaver was idle for forty minutes.

Macromedia also hired an engineer for two years to work on the HTML rendering engine used in Dreamweaver. They could of used Gecko like Nvu (formerly Mozilla Composer), but rather have created their own terrific renderer with very slick features. Users can now use a zoom function to create pixel-perfect layouts. The CSS editor in design-mode has also been condensed. It is now accessible from one panel rather than a cumbersome three.

We were also shown a small sample of Dreamweaver’s support for XSLT, XML and XPATH. Even if users have no prior knowledge of these technologies Dreamweaver can assist teaching or completely handle the code generation for us. I currently use XSLT occasionally, but not frequently enough to grasp a strong understanding for use in more professional environments. Dreamweaver’s XML support would certainly be advantageous in assisting me with these technologies.

It was evident in all products that the merger with Adobe has possibly opened up a shared code agreement in which many of Photoshop’s notable features can now be found in most of Studio 8. This may or may not be true, but Flash certainly contains a hell of alot more filters!

Pricing has also been revised for this release weighing in at about $1,500 for a full license and the various other upgrade paths. Freehand has notably been dropped, but is still available separately (I never used it anyway). On the whole Studio 8 is a very, very nice software suite and I will defiantely be upgrading on it’s release later this month. You should too!