The news of Adobe buying Macromedia has come as a bit of a shock to me. Shortly after I became a professional web developer, I started using Allaire Homesite as my IDE of choice. Soon after that, Allaire were swallowed up by Macromedia and, in time, I ended up switching to Dreamweaver MX as the company neglected the development of Homesite.
With Adobe already having GoLive (a poor competitor to DWMX), I wonder what’ll become of the two tools when it all shakes out. It doesn’t seem likely that Adobe would keep identical horses in its stable of applications, and I dread to think the collision course that Fireworks and Photoshop are on.
It’ll be interesting to see how things go, but should Adobe make a mess of things I’ll probably jump ship to the Zend development suite. At least that’s intended for php development and, hopefully, isn’t as bloated as Dreamweaver has become.
Update: The Register have an article up that echoes my concerns about the Adobe / Macromedia “merger”.