Let the speculation begin! Adobe has completed the acquisition of Macromedia and has started the merging with a new co-branded Macromedia home page. Now all of us die hard fans will have to sit back and see what becomes of our favorite tools. Here is what I expect the line-up to be:

The Shoe-ins

These are the sure fire not going to go anywhere candidates. These tools dominate the market and I don’t see them going anywhere.

• Photoshop. This is a given. It’s the most widely used graphics tool on the planet.
• Flash. This one is also a given. It is the most widely used tool in the Macromedia line-up and has been at the center of all of their product development over the last couple of years.
• InDesign. With InDesign it’s not really a question of what Macromedia tool it replaces - the real question is how long can those diehard Quark users continue to ignore this tool.
• Dreamweaver/Contribute combo . Simply the best HTML/XHTML all around web editor available. Need I say more?

The Unknowns

Not sure what will happen with these tools.

• Illustrator/Freehand. Even though Freehand was the original vector graphics tool (and to this day it still has features that Illustrator doesn’t), I expect the vector tool will be Illustrator. Although I sure hope they pull in some of the Freehand tools.
• Fireworks/ImageReady. If you haven’t used Fireworks for producing a Web site you probably don’t know how powerful it is for this purpose. ImageReady is good, but it is light years away from the functionality in Fireworks.
• Director/Premiere/After Effects. Really Premiere and After Effects belong in the shoe-ins category, but Director adds an added dimension to this tool set with it’s built in affinity for Web content.
• Flashpaper/Acrobat. Two great tools for published to the Web. Not sure what direction they will take on this one.

All this is just my speculation. Who knows what will really happen when the dust settles. It should be fun to watch.

As a historical note, it’s good to see some sibling tools reunited. Freedhand and Pagemaker were originally owned by now defunct Aldus.