This software package was designed to provide the tools needed to produce professional looking printed materials and high-impact web sites. The pairing of these two programs makes it possible to create web site and printed materials to support any marketer’s sales campaign presentations.

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The heart of this bundle is Flash 5. It is Macromedia’s award winning web content creation software. Flash is becoming widely used to create animation and dynamic interactive online content. A designer can easily create engaging graphics and still keep file sizes under control. The Flash player is present in a majority of the browsers in use today, and that has made Macromedia’s Flash program the industry standard for producing high-impact web animations and dynamic site content. It is easy to create animated text or simple graphics. Flash also has the ability to create multi-layer animation (movies) with different graphics moving at different speeds, directions, effects, and also easily lets the creator incorporate sound into the movie. Flash has a great feature for creating a Motion Tween, which is a wonderful time-saver, but be aware, you MUST follow Flash’s rules, or it will not work (trust me on this one). A Motion Tween is where an object moves from point A to point B. You position the object at the starting and ending points, and Flash does all of the work (i.e. creating the frames needed) to move the object.

Flash was originally designed as drawing software, but its main focus now is to create animation. You can create basic drawings and text in Flash, but for the more intricate and complex types of graphics, you are better off if you create your graphic in another program, such as Freehand or Illustrator and import it into Flash. Flash’s main focus is for designing animation for the web. You can easily learn to animate text or simple shapes.

FreeHand 9 is paired up with Flash, so that you can design your entire site in FreeHand and seamlessly import your files into Flash for animation. FreeHand is an extremely powerful drawing tool for both print and online applications. You can map FreeHand pages to scenes or frames in Flash. This combination allows you to output your storyboards from FreeHand as an interactive, portable Flash file. You can also share named symbols and instances from FreeHand to Flash thru the library. This program offers sophisticated illustration tools, timesaving productivity features (easiest and best stars I have ever drawn!), and tight integration with the other Macromedia web publishing software programs such as Flash, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver. This release of FreeHand focuses on the needs of today’s designers, who often must create for both print and web applications.

In addition, this software bundle also includes Generator 2, which can dynamically insert text, sounds, and images into web pages. Although Flash has a feature for exporting or publishing your movie, you must still take it another step to get the movie into a web page, by using some sort of text editor, such as notepad or Homesite, or a WYSIWYG such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage.

My interest in this product was to add some pizzazz to my web sites, more than just the effects I can produce with JavaScript or Photoshop. In the past, most of my web page creation had consisted of using HTML and JavaScript. My main tools were a text editor (either Notepad, or Homesite), and Photoshop. Although this combination does produce working pages, with clean code, I wanted to add more elements that contribute visual interest to a site. I have a number of web sites in the planning stage, both personal and business. After having a chance to use the product, I would definitely buy it, and will continue to use it.

I had been considering the purchase of several different Macromedia software bundles. The one I was leaning toward was the Macromedia Web Design Studio. That bundle contains Dreamweaver 4, Fireworks 4, Flash 5, and Freehand 9. I knew I definitely wanted more than just the Dreamweaver and Fireworks bundle, which is geared toward building web pages. I would still like to get Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and see how the four programs work together.

I found FreeHand to be a far superior drawing tool than any thing else I have used. It does have a slow learning curve for beginners, even if you have used some other types of drawing programs. The tools are more complex, and there is much greater variety and control in types of graphics that you can do, and achieve much more professional looking results, than with the simpler drawing tool programs.

One of the main attractions for me with this software package is the orientation to web development, and the sister programs also produced by Macromedia which work hand in hand with these applications (two of those being Fireworks and Dreamweaver). There are a number of considerations that are critical in the design of output for web use, such as web safe colors, and file size. Because of Macromedia’s focus on web site development, there are features in their software which make is much easier to comply in these key areas.

Macromedia has put a lot of effort into producing good solid tools. The variety that Freehand offers for both web and print is a big plus, in that you can create for two very different types of media, but need only master one program. Both are very complex programs, and not something that one is likely to become an expert user of in just a few hours. The learning curve is slow, and the display can be very confusing with all the floating panels that pop open. It is easy to get lost, especially in Flash. I found both programs to be unforgiving at times, and not particularly intuitive. The same tool has a different name in the two programs (Flash calls it the "arrow" tool, FreeHand refers to it as the "pointer").

Simple steps such as filling a drawn object with color are done quite differently in Flash and FreeHand. It is extremely easy to get lost, and critical to know where you are, or you can destroy your project. These are definitely not programs for those with little patience, or who are in a hurry to get something done.

I had more than one instance where Flash would not perform a step I needed to complete. The program gave me no clue as to what the problem was. In one case, I recreated the drawing, and then was able to proceed. In another, I imported the graphic from the tutorial and continued from there. Another thing that bothered me was that when you publish your movie, Flash does NOT tell you where it is putting the file. I knew where to look for them because one of the books I had purchased told me Flash saves files to your "Mydocuments" folder. It is possible that the users manual does tell you where the files are being put, but I did not find any information after a quick scan.

Another drawback besides the slow learning curve is the price. You can expect to pay anywhere from $300.00 to over $500.00 for this software. I would consider other alternatives before purchasing such expensive software, since it is also going to require a substantial investment of time as well, to truly benefit from and utilize all of the features that are available.

There are several rather sizable users manuals that come with the software. The Freehand manual is a total of 309 pages long including an index. Flash has two manuals. The manuals are: "Using Flash" which has 380 pages, and the "ActionScript Reference Guide", which has 453 pages, including the index. The manual for Flash recommends that you go through the lessons first, before trying to work through the tutorial. I did try that step, and worked through all of the lessons. After looking through the manuals, I chose to use another source for my learning aids. I invested in four books, which I have been using to learn the programs. I also referred to these books as I developed my first original movie.

The books I used are:

• Sams Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash 5 in 24 Hours
• Teach Yourself Visually Flash 5 (best used as a quick reference guide)
• Flash 5 Visual Jumpstart
• Macromedia Freehand 9 Authorized

After having worked through the exercises in the books, I had a much better idea of some of the effects I could create. For my sample movie, I came up the some ideas of things I wanted do, and then decided which tool would be best to use to perform those tasks. I spent less than half a day actually creating the movie, and a lot of that time consisted of "Undo's" because I forgot a step, or did something in the wrong place. These are problems that should go away as I become more experienced. Overall, I did have fun, and I look forward to creating more movies and special effects. I do feel, that I am already at the point where I could produce professional looking results. I did not include any sound with this movie. Sound files can greatly increase the size of the movie causing much slower downloads.

I did not have any trouble installing either program. I do on occasion have trouble opening Flash, and at this point we are not sure if it is hardware or a software issue. I did not see any patches on the web site that addressed my particular problem either.

I have been enjoying working with these two products because I am interested in using some of the features to produce more dynamic elements for my web pages. I do have a background in working on webs and with graphics, so some of the concepts, such as layering were already familiar to me. However, even after using this product for a fair number of hours, I feel that it will require many more hours before I am reasonably competent with this software. I was glad that I have spent considerable time using Photoshop, so that a lot of the concepts and tools did not seem so foreign as they might to a first time user of a graphics oriented program. One book I read said that because "Flash is so unique, the less you know, the better!" (for ease of learning). It is definitely not a program I would recommend to the "weekend warrior" type who wants something they can master in matter of days.

Macromedia Flash 5 - Freehand 9 Studio
(Freehand 10 was recently released.)
[$550.00 Street Price]