Macromedia president Norm Meyrowitz kicked off his Macworld CreativePro Conference & Expo presentation by talking of the company’s 20-year association with Apple, as well as promoting the recently announced Contribute 2.0. He said he knew Apple CEO Steve Jobs “back when beige was big.”
“Macs keep getting smaller with more memory while I keep getting bigger with less memory,” Meyrowitz joked.
He talked about how that Macromedia products such as Dreamweaver and Flash have helped creative professionals streamline their work. He showed how the solutions were used for tasks such as implementing an online cattle auction and online configuring of a customized automobile.
Meyrowitz highlighted Contribute 2.0, the upcoming Mac OS X version of the desktop application designed to provide an easy-to-use way for nontechnical users to update Web pages and add pages to existing Web sites. Contribute Product Manager Erik Larson came onstage to demo and explain the new software. He wore a fly fishing outfit to illustrate his point that Contribute takes some of the grunt work out of Web site maintenance, giving you more time for things such as, well, fishing.
Then Ken Nita, the associate director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, came onstage (also dressed for fishing) to tell how Contribute was being used to streamline the updating process of the MoMA Web site. The demo was marred by some technical difficulties.
“The technical difficulties are actually intentional so you can see it is still beta software,” Meyrowitz joked. “So this was actually planned.”