a Tuesday feature
News from the Macromedia Users Conference
As many of you know, the 1996 Macromedia Users Conference took place last week. There were many announcements made on the Shockwave front. Perhaps one of the most significant was the announcement of Freehand Graphic Studio 7 and the abundance of Shockwave features it will add to the Web. This column provides an overview of this new product and some additional information Macromedia has released about its new Shockwave feature set.
Freehand Graphic Studio 7 Expands Support for Shockwave Content
The Studio's support for Shockwave enables FreeHand designers to instantly integrate Web pages with beautiful, compact, resolution-independent vector graphics--downloadable in one third the time of comparable bitmaps.Shockwave offers user interactivity through controlled zooming and scrolling of up to 25,600 percent, allowing viewing of the finest details of images and graphics within any size Web page. Shockwave also simplifies cumbersome mapping techniques, enabling users to create "hot links" or add URLs to any graphics. For added creative flexibility without taking up significant bandwidth, designers can use Shockwave to put existing content from other illustration packages on the Web--saving valuable creative time and money. With this update to Shockwave, designers can also embed anti-aliased fonts to their graphics.
"New Shockwave functionality in FreeHand 7 lets us repurpose our detail-rich graphics for the Web," said Terry Laupp, systems manager at Phoenix Creative in St. Louis, MO. "We're also developing dynamic, new content for the Web by leveraging new FreeHand 7 capabilities, directly embedding FreeHand graphics onto Web pages, providing unique and interactive features for our customers."
New Internet functionality is also included in the new Macromedia xRes 3, enabling designers to create exciting Shockwave content and allowing Web surfers to view large, high-resolution, photographic and bitmap files on the Internet with no delay. Shockwave's new streaming and progressive rendering features enable users to pan and zoom into sections of beautiful, detailed, multi-megabyte (100 MB+) images without having to download the entire file or compromise image quality.
Developers can use the new Extreme 3D2 to create VRML 2.0 3D content, allowing Web surfers to view and interact in stunning 3D worlds. E3D is a leading cross-platform tool for creating cutting-edge VRML 2.0 content for the Internet, and includes geometry, materials, lights, and cameras, as well as supporting associated URL addresses for anchors, inlines, and textures.
If you want to learn more about the new Freehand Graphic Studio, log onto the Macromedia Web site.
