Brian Fitzgerald

Subscribers to Macromedia’s DevNet service are reporting that they have been provided links today to download the parts of the new studio 8. Perhaps the rest of us will get it today also… (fingers crossed)

Another school year has started and things are humming. I’ve just switched my blog from being based on Movable Type to WordPress and things are probably going to be a little funky here for a week while I learn this new environment and make this what I want it to be.

I'm three days late on this, but Macromedia announced Studio 8 (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, Contribute and FlashPaper) on August 8. 8 on 8/8. Great huh? Anyway, I'm quite a bit saddened that Freehand is not in the package as this almost certainly means that it's death is eminent. They have not said as much, but I'm not sure what else a person could think with the coming Adobe merger.

So what's new? One of the smallest new features, but one of the most exciting to me is a tabbed document interface in Dreamweaver for Macintosh. There is a new CSS panel that better merges all CSS work into a single place. You can now use Dreamweaver to edit XML and XSL documents. You can also now do "code folding" which allows you to collapse parts of your code that you are not working on. The product is scheduled to be released at the beginning of September.

As part of a new series of articles from Macromedia centered around the Studio 8 announcement, Marius Zaharia has written one titled "XML Overview" that does a very nice job of explaining XML, it's connection to HTML and XHTML, and XSL. If you are interested in these topics, this article is worth reading.

Again, for any interested, here are the presentation slides and handout from my "Next Web" presentation on Tuesday at the Midwest Internet Institute in Lincoln.

View Presentation | Download Handout

For anybody that might be interested. Here are the files that I used during my session on cascading style sheets Monday afternoon at the Midwest Internet Institute in Lincoln. They are included here as a zip file that you can expand and proceed to play around with if you wish. The presentation itself is also here. Please be patient with these while they download as my server uplink is not very fast.

Download: Presentation | Files

iTunes 4.9 was release sometime either last night or this morning and now features podcast subscriptions. It is so super easy, you can browse the store for podcasts in the same way that you browse for music. When you find something you like you simply hit "subscribe". You can customize how many shows you would like and best of all, you can tell iTunes how to clean up after itself so that old shows are removed as new shows are downloaded. Two great new podcasts are Adam Curry's new PodFinder where Adam plays snippits of other podcasts and Apple's New Music Tuesday podcast where new tunes and albums are introduced. Both take advantage of iTunes ability to display timecode triggered events that allow you to go straight to the podcast or album that you are listening to at that moment.

Whining Dave Winer posted a honest reason for his deciding to cancel his Audible service, which Audible CEO Don Katz blasted him for (I bet he doesn't blast people for posting about subscribing), and in typical form Winer opened both barrels back on him in his blog. Stupid stuff.

Here's a blog specifically to help folks with the cfchart part of coldfusion

You know you want one

Link

The "Giant-Ass Image Viewer" is a very similar project that is demonstrated and explained.

Here's 7 simple steps that describe the blogging process (publisher to reader).

I've been to a few conferences where "poster sessions" have been offered, but I've always been a little confused by the title since I have never seen a poster at these sessions. Here's a post I found that gives good tips for presenting a poster session and a definition of what one is (they are supposed to have posters).

iPodder (the free, open-source podcast client) is really maturing nicely and the newest version, 2.1, is the first that would have me considering it has a primary means of managing subscriptions. The great effort may be coming to an end however as we await iTunes 4.9 with it's podcast support.

Steve (CEO of Pixar and Apple) addressed the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University this spring.

Will Richardson contemplates what Wikipedia means to research papers.

Pay pal has a page showing some ways to spot fraud emails. Good thing since they are so common and so authentic looking.

Jobs finally announced it yesterday around noon, central time. Apple will be starting to include Intel chips in its systems. I’m pretty excited about this. Apple released the PowerBook G4 a long, long time ago and there is no G5 in sight. It seemed that with IBM’s new chip production facility that the stall may be short-lived. It seems apparent now that there are no major speed-bumps in sight (at least for power-book chips) and I’m sure that IBM is more excited right now by the prospect of delivering chips for the XBOX 2, PlayStation 3 and the new Nintendo game systems.

Apple needs to get on track with something that is going to deliver consistent improvement over time and the only logical partner is Intel. A few of the articles I have read see this as something that will confuse customers and drive them away. I don’t see it that way. Did UNIX scare customers away? Unless someone fires up a terminal, there is no hint that UNIX is sitting under the hood. It’s not an issue. Likewise, as long as Apple uses the new chips in the same way that it has used the PPC chips, there should be no issues. Apple has already said that it will not allow OS X to run on non-apple computers. This eliminates a lot of compatibility issues. The hacks out there won’t like it, but Apple computers are what they are largely because they are a closed system. Apple knows, for the most part, exactly what is in each computer and they can design the OS accordingly. Apple is not going to address the compatibility nightmare the Microsoft does with Windows.

I just hope that the next wave of PowerBooks doesn’t have a goofy Intel sticker on them.

CSS3 promises the ability to have multiple columns (think newspaper layout). Exciting.

Looks like XHTML2 is coming soon and it sounds great!! Here is a presentation about it and here is the working draft.

I had never found a great Fireworks forum, but there seems to be good discussion here at geekforum.

Wikis, getting bigger and bigger, are featured in a Time article.

Willowdale Elementary School in Omaha has a podcast called Radio WillowWeb.

Nokia and others think that mp3-enabled cell phones will overtake the iPod. I think that, for the time being, they are nuts. As long as you have to buy phones from only your vendor and buying a phone usually happens only when getting a new contract, people are not going to race out and get these phones. While they may sell 12 million phones a year, I would sure be interested to know how many of those are the $500+ models. I can’t think of anybody I know that has a real fancy phone, although there are certainly many available. Additionally, you don’t need your mp3 player everywhere while you may choose to take your phone everywhere. Why allow your phone take on that additional heft for something you don’t always need?