Name: Jim Babbage
Position: Teacher of imaging, Web design, and photography at Centennial College's Centre for Creative Communications (www.thecentre.centennialcollege.ca) and partner in Newmedia Services (www.nms123.ca), a small communications company.
Technologies used: Fireworks, Dreamweaver and Captivate

Q. Having put the X into eXperience, what new areas are you looking forward to Macromedia's team heading off into (including as part of a merged Adobe-Macromedia)?

A. An even more robust, feature rich Fireworks application, that merges the bitmap strengths of Photoshop (notice I did not say ImageReady) with the workflow and live editing capabilities of Fireworks and the vector power of FreeHand. Not asking for much, am I? With Dreamweaver, even more standards compliance and CSS rendering support.

Name: Tom Muck
Position: Senior Applications Developer for Integram in Northern Virginia and coauthor of three UltraDev books including the bestseller, Dreamweaver UltraDev4: The Complete Reference.
Technologies used: ColdFusion MX as a server technology, Dreamweaver MX as a tool, and Flash Remoting MX in some applications.

"The ColdFusion platform is amazing for ease of use, and also scales very well to an enterprise level. Experienced Java programmers can make use of Java to get down into the nitty-gritty, but the core functionality of an application can be built quickly in CFML. Enterprise-level applications can be delivered much more quickly using ColdFusion than any other technology."

Q. In the last ten years what non-Macromedia technologies (if any!!) have you envied?

A. I have always wished that Macromedia had put a debugger on the ColdFusion back end, as well as on the Dreamweaver front end, to assist in coding. Other technologies like PHP and ASP.NET have excellent step debuggers that speed up coding. Macromedia has not pushed to get debuggers into their tools or servers. The debugger in PHPed is great, and just what Macromedia needs for its ColdFusion language.

Q. And the future - if the merger goes ahead?

A. I would hope that Adobe/Macromedia would continue on a similar path, but maybe with some more resources and more muscle. For example, Dreamweaver is the best web tool around, but is still lacking a lot in key areas, such as debugging capabilities, performance, stability, and team development. I'd love to see Adobe/Macromedia put the same effort into web tools that Microsoft puts into their Visual Studio.

Name: Erik Bianchi
Position: Software engineer with more than five years of experience developing Flash-based RIAs and enterprise-wide applications for Fortune 50 and 500 companies (www.erikbianchi.com).
Technologies used: Flash MX Professional 2004 and I play around with Flex.

"What Macromedia has done better than most other companies is a) its community relations - really supporting the Flash community with various blogs, newsgroups, user groups, conferences, developer centers (devnet) articles, online presentations, and trial versions of software."

Q. In the last ten years what non-Macromedia technologies (if any!!) have you envied?

A. Outside of the Macromedia sandbox I do have my eye on Xamlon Web, which allows you to develop Flash applications using XAML and C# in .NET which is very appealing to me on multiple levels. 1) it gets me out of the Flash IDE and using .NET and 2) I imagine that this would make Flash development much more approachable to .NET and other developers.

Q. When it comes to enterprise-class development, what do you consider Macromedia's main contribution to be in terms of technology and inspiration?

A. Macromedia's Flash has certainly upped the ante in how applications UIs are perceived. Because what we are dealing with are web applications that run across multiple OSs and served from a remote location, we don't have to worry about actually installing anything on the client's machine or compatibility issues. This I think gives us some creative freedoms that other developers don't enjoy for typical shrink wrapped products.

In a way I see Flash developers as pioneers as they are more easily able to mix creative expressions with technology. You want to add an experimental UI to your application you can do it. If it doesn't work you can easily (in a well architected application) pull it out for something more traditional and only have to worry about changing the swf on the server. However it's rather unfortunate that dynamic runtime share libraries are not well supported.

Q. Having put the X into eXperience, what new areas are you looking forward to Macromedia's team heading off into (including as part of a merged Adobe-Macromedia)?

A. The faster rendering capabilities that are provided by bitmap caching and the new player filters seem amazing in the next Flash Player! Also, I think we (as Flash developers) have a lot to look forward to with the repositioning of Flash as a development platform. I've been referring to Flash as my development platform now for years but with Macromedia's backing I think that it adds a bit more validity to my statement and that it says a lot about where Flash is going and how it is going to be perceived by other non-Flash developers.

Name: Dennis Baldwin
Position: Software developer for SensorLogic Inc - runs and maintains an online community for Flash and ColdFusion developers (www.devmx.com).
Technologies used: Flex, Flash MX Pro, ColdFusion MX, Dreamweaver MX

"The future is bright for application developers because we'll be able to leverage the Flash platform to deliver robust applications in a fraction of the time."

Q. In the last ten years what non-Macromedia technologies (if any!!) have you envied?

A. Adobe Photoshop; Adobe Illustrator