Well it seems that every man and his dog has waded in on this one so I figure I should throw in my $0.2.

My initial reaction was one of shock and awe. The primary tools that I use on an hourly basis are Photoshop and Dreamweaver and the notion of increased interaction between the two seems very pleasing indeed. Then I started to think about the other areas in the Adobe / MM toolset and I have to wonder which will flourish and which will be put quietly out to pasture.

Dreamweaver / GoLive

Heh. This is the easiest to call. Dreamweaver has a substantial user base supported by a strong developer community. The de-facto standard for web designers around the world it is mature, (mostly) stable and well loved. GoLive has … a nice picture on the box.

We can kiss GoLive goodbye.

What I would like to see is a redevelopment of Dreamweaver to bring it up to the standard of Photoshop, both in terms of speed and reliability. Any one who’s used DW to design large sites or complex server side pages will know that it gets a little flaky when stretched… especially on Windows machines.

I’d also expect that the integration between Dreamweaver and its new siblings be increased to the level that we are accustomed to between the Adobe suite.

Photoshop / Image Ready / Fireworks

Photoshop is too well entrenched in the world of design, both on and off line. Image Ready is still viewed by many as a waste of disk space and Fireworks doesn’t compete with either of them very well. This is not to say that Fireworks doesn’t have a decent user base but the primary benefit of using it as your image editor is the integration with Dreamweaver. Assuming that Adobe revamp the next releases of PS and DW to integrate the two products then there is no reason to maintain the Fireworks toolset.

Photoshop stays, Fireworks is absorbed into the already marginal Image Ready and the sobbing wailing mass of Fireworks users finally try Photoshop and realise what they’ve been missing all these years.

Illustrator / Freehand

Now this one is a toughy. Illustrator is the standard for vector art design and has a massive toolset, perfect integration with Photoshop and Post Script (PDF) formats… but Freehand is also an established product in its own right with some really good features.

I suppose it is inevitable that Freehand will be sucked into Illustrator but it will require a fairly major reworking of the illustrator core features. Designers (especially those for the web) are not going to be happy to see the Flash related tools in Freehand disappear.

Flash / ?

Many are saying that Flash is the primary reason for this buy-out and I’m inclined to agree with them. I’m not really sure what Abode has planned for this monster of a program but I would expect to see integration with Illustrator and with Premiere / Audition.

Flash is going to be around for a good while yet and it will be interesting to see what Adobe make of it.

PDF / FlashPaper

Simple enough to guess, FlashPaper will be subsumed into the PDF toolset. I can’t imagine for one second that Adobe will maintain the Flash element of FlashPaper, not when they are already the market leader in E-Documents will an established format and a user base that is almost as expansive as that of Flash itself.

Macromedia’s Server tools

And this means more than just Cold Fusion. There is a fairly hefty raft of servers and server components developed or acquired and redeveloped by Macromedia. These are going to have to be maintained if only because they are currently in use in so many production environments that dumping them would be devastating.

What I would like to see is use of the Cold Fusion platform for more collaborative tools in the Adobe programs. Continued development of this toolset would lead to a major increase in the Cold Fusion user base, especially if it is made simple enough to develop with (and let’s face it, it’s already pretty simple). If designers are suddenly provided with a simple, integrated development platform from which to launch their work I should imagine it will lead to a down turn in the Designer / Developer partnerships and an upswing in one stop solution provision. Whilst this won’t overly worry Microsoft and the developers of PHP it’s good to see a technology that is as accessible and usable as Cold fusion getting a new lease of life.

As for the other, more specific server platforms (Flex, Authorware, etc.) I can’t see any reason for Adobe to cease development of them, especially not when they complement the existing toolsets so well.

So to sum-up. Unless you are a die hard Macromedia user (and by that I mean Fireworks and Freehand) then this acquirement is definitely a good thing. All we can do is sit back and wait for the next releases and keep our ears to the ground for sneek peeks.