We're down to the last major pieces of Adobe CS5 Web Premium, but last doesn't always mean least. OR DOES IT??? HMMMM??? With that as a spectacular teaser, let's spend our final installment looking at two holdovers from those halcyon Macromedia days of yore: Dreamweaver, the venerable web site building tool, and Fireworks, the oft-overlooked prototyping and vector/bitmap editing powerhouse.

Honesty time, dear readers: I don't think this is going to be an actual review. As Velveeta is to real cheese, there may be some review-like qualities to what follows, but considering the current all-out assault on Flash and everything it stands for, it may be beneficial to take a larger view of what Adobe has done in Web Premium CS5, namely the inclusion of not one, not two, but three separate tools for creating Flash content.

Adobe CS5 is finally shipping, so over the next few weeks we'll looking at the major programs which comprise the Web Premium package, starting off with the old stalwarts of the group. Now, it's somewhat hard to believe that 2010 marks Photoshop's 20th anniversary, with Illustrator having been around for a few years even before that, but here we are. Both products have certainly seen a lot of design trends and operating systems come and go in their time, but lest I take a long, nostalgic detour down software memory lane, let's simply get to the latest and greatest.

Flash wrappers, as I tend to call the genre of software Screentime's mProjector belongs to, have been around almost as long as Flash itself. Whatever the reason for their rise (the decline of Director, needing offline access to online content, etc.), there are still several options out there for turning your Flash content into desktop applications. And while Adobe's own AIR technology seems to get all the press, there is no reason why mProjector shouldn't be considered one of the top dogs in cross-platform Flash desktop app creation.

In what has become something of a Macworld tradition, Roxio once again used the annual gathering of Apple faithful as the backdrop for the unveiling of version 10 of its stalwart Toast Titanium media management product. As in past years, more features have been added and the upgrade price is still terrible, but this year there's a new wrinkle. Let's dive in to see what's changed this time around.

In the spirit of the four year hiatus between versions (and accompanying uncertainty as to the dead/not dead status of the product), it's only fitting I let almost a year roll by between the announcement/release of Director 11 and finally getting around to reviewing it. In any event, Director is back from its long slumber, so let's take a look at what the eleventh release of the former king of the multimedia hill brings to the table.

I have a confession to make: while I covered the initial announcement of Adobe Fireworks CS3 in the spring of last year, I never followed up with a full review. Why? Because, frankly, there wasn't much to it. It seemed like a quick port, done under duress and ultimately boasting only a thimbleful of largely forgettable features, not to mention the seemingly halfhearted attempt to give Fireworks a new purpose as a prototyping tool. The good news is that the situation couldn't be more different with the latest version of the former Macromedia stalwart, so let us count the ways.

It only took the better part of a decade, but Dreamweaver CS4 finally adds enough features and enhancements to earn a reprieve from what I thought would be the inevitable call to nuke it from orbit. And while it doesn't get all the way to where I'd personally like to see the product, Dreamweaver CS4 seems to have reversed its slow (and sad) decline, and for the first time in a very, very long time, I've come to like where things are going.

I have bad news for those out there who were expecting Flash CS4 to, well, suck: It doesn't. Far from it. Adobe certainly seems to have responded to the pressure of having viable Flash competition by delivering a polished upgrade that is chock full of thoughtful improvements and useful new features. So despite the fact that I've spoiled the ending, I hope you'll come along as we explore the latest and greatest in the most recent release of the Flash authoring tool.

It's almost hard to believe that Photoshop has been around for close to two decades, and to say that it has come a long way from its humble beginnings would be something of an understatement. It's also similarly hard to believe that Photoshop CS3 was only released last year, so what does the CS4 version (11.0 for those keeping track of traditional version numbers), which is now shipping only a scant 18 months later, bring to the table? Let's dive in and find out.

I really thought my life would turn out differently. Back in college in the early 90s, I was part of a 2-man cover group that played the local bar scene (with actual guitars, I might add). Today, I press plastic buttons on a facsimile Gibson SG, pretending I'm shredding to one slammin' rock song after another. I don't need to be told that this is pathetic, but damned if I'm not having a blast anyway. This is the reality of the Guitar Hero series, which has offered up addictive fun even while making you look like an enormous tool.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year or so, chances are that you've at least heard that you can run non-Apple operating systems on Intel Macs using a number of methods. The one we're going to concern ourselves today is virtualization, focusing on a product that, to the outside observer, seemed to come out of nowhere in the last year: Parallels Desktop for Mac. Version 3 has just been loosed upon the Mac universe, so let's see what's doing in the latest rev of the virtualization solution for Intel Macs.

It's the moment that a whole bunch of Web designers and producers (especially those with Intel Macs) have been waiting many a moon for: Adobe's CS3 Design and Web suites are finally shipping. Today, we're going to be checking out the Web Premium bundle, which features former Macromedia products finally brought together with traditional Adobe stalwarts in an all-star lineup of Web production bliss. That's the idea, anyway—out in the field, the Web Premium suite is a blend of fantastic features and worthwhile upgrades mixed with a sizable amount of disappointment.

Even though I'm only a casual Dreamweaver user these days, I get excited every time a new version of the legendary visual editor is released, hoping against hope that this is the one that gets me to abandon my now stubbornly-ingrained habit of hand-coding HTML and CSS and back into really (ab)using the product that I loved so dearly in the late 90s. It's now Dreamweaver CS3's turn at bat, so let's find out how it does in its first plate appearance as an Adobe product.

It hasn't even been two years since Macromedia-that-was unleashed Flash 8 (a huge step forward for the juggernaut [insert favorite use here] application), and now along comes Flash CS3 Professional. Sporting a new surname and a slew of new features, how does the now-Adobe product stack up, even as Microsoft's Silverlight (the technology formerly known as "Sparkle") begins its attempt to crash the party? Read on to find out.

Toast has been around for what seems like forever, dutifully providing us fun-lovin' and free-wheelin' Mac users with delicious disc burning goodness throughout all the tumult and upheaval the last decade-and-a-half (or so) has brought to the world of computing. And while that last statement was perhaps a tad dramatic, the point is that Toast is a very mature product which Roxio somehow manages to make more and more useful with every release, and Toast 8 Titanium is no exception.

The folks at Telestream have been busy of late—among other things, we've seen the release of version 2 of the Flip4Mac WMV components, the update of same to run natively on Intel Macs, Telestream's acquisition of Popwire, and finally, the re-branding of the former Compression Master as the Episode series of products. Today's review specifically concerns Episode Pro 4.2 (+ Flash 8), and as a service to those of you with the attention span of a gnat (like myself) who like to get to the bottom line quickly, here it is: Episode=excellent.

If you're a Web designer, the process of writing code can be highly personal and subjective. Some swear by integrated development environments like Dreamweaver, while others are more than happy to hand-code. Now, if you just so happen to have planted your flag in latter camp, and you just so happen to develop on a Mac, then you really should take a good, long look at MacRabbit's CSSEdit 2.

Back in junior high, I owned what I thought was the coolest gadget ever: a radio built into a pair of slim, Walkman-style headphones. The radio itself was the size of a postage stamp, and I postulated at the time that it wouldn't be too long before there were dime-sized "cassettes" that one could load into a playback device of a similar size. Lame visions of the future notwithstanding, I can finally declare my "dream" from 1986 to be a reality in the form of Apple's newest iPod Shuffle.

Macromedia (or, I guess it's Adobe now) Flash is great for browser-based stuff, but let's face facts: it's pretty lousy for offline use. Sure, you can save Flash movies as standalone projectors, but the glaring lack of customization or ability to interface with the host OS has created a mammoth opening for third parties to drive through. Enter Zinc, from UK-based MDM, which (to put it simply but crudely) puts Flash movies on an enormous steroid regimen. How well does it make Flash into a full-blown application development environment? Let's find out.