eMac and MX
Talk about a double jolt of news to wash down with your morning cup of coffee. Apple comes out of nowhere with a brand new, redesigned version of the iMac for education, and Macromedia formally announces Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks MX.
Apple's new iMac, now known as an eMac, answers many teacher's concerns about the recently launched iMac, namely that floating, bopping LCD screen.
What's not to love? Think back to elementary school for a moment. The computer lab in my school, which it's worth noting was a major technological shock when it happened, was a sea of beige Apple IIs with green monochrome screens. Beige quickly turned to all shades of ball point ink, as kids scrawled everything from Van Halen logos to odes of love on the machines. If graffiti wasn't enough, kids would often smack the monitors like an old TV when their hand typed BASIC code didn't work. Put simply, the machines took a beating.
Apple sells a ton of iMacs to schools for this very reason. Those (now) bulky CRT gumdrops can withstand a classroom of grubby little fists of fury, unlike the dainty new iMac which is just begging for trouble.
The interesting part about the eMac is that Apple, for whatever reason, is only offering it to school administrators and/or students. I personally think it's quite ugly, and wouldn't dream of buying one over the LCD iMac, but segmenting its product line doesn't seem like the smartest business plan. Then again, what do I know. :)
In other, more expected news, Macromedia formally announced Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks MX. Like the release of Flash MX, Macromedia is offering a free preview of each application for Windows / Mac for you to download.
Notable highlights of Dreamweaver MX include a revamped GUI (a lot like Flash MX), much better support for CSS, XML and web standards support, and server application tools to easily integrate PHP, ASP, .NET, ColdFusion, or JSP into your web site. Macromedia is obviously pushing ColdFusion as the best solution, but it's nice to see them fully support the wide range of scripting languages.
Fireworks, which I never use, continues to integrate itself more with Dreamweaver, and includes many of the same GUI enhancements the other MX products offer. There's support for XHTML and XML and all kinds of enhanced templates and wizards, but I personally have yet to see a real use for most of this. Hey, I'm old school. I'll take Photoshop and BBEdit any day.
Comments
I just saw for eMac for the first time too. I'm surprised that the back of the machine doesn't have an Apple logo on it. Check out the quicktime VR video to see what i mean.
-mat
Posted by: Mathew at April 29, 2002 8:58 AM
Ever since I started using Fireworks two years ago I have been known to be somewhat evangelical in my promotion of it as a design tool. Created specifically for 72dpi design, Fireworks destroys the limiting distinction between vector and raster editing by seamlessly intergrating pixels and symbols. I use Fireworks for all of my non-print design work, and I highly recommend it to all Web designers. Invest a week into it. As a rider I should mention that I have yet to try Fireworks MX, but am downloading it as I write this.
Posted by: Antony at April 29, 2002 9:58 AM
Ii must plug Fireworks too. While I'm not a fan of any of it's code generation it's vector2pixel capabilities are pretty solid. It's a fast and competent tool for editing graphics.
Posted by: albert at April 30, 2002 2:04 AM
