So, Adobe is to buy Macromedia then. Good. Usually when I hear of one software company 'merging' (usually a term for one being subsumed by the other - and often for the purpose of eliminating competition) with another, I wonder what we 'users' are going to lose when it happens. Not this time. If ever there was a marriage meant to happen, it must be these two organisations.


Adobe: PhotoShop, Illustrator, inDesign, text and web publishing software, Digital Video editing and of course Acrobat - the universal leveller of rich documents across all computing platforms.


Marcomedia: Digital Video editing, a competitor to Illustrator and of course Flash and Shockwave animation. Flash + PDF = ??? Well, we'll no douobt find out. The deal is not "done" until September but doubtless everyone in both organisations is already working hard to fit the two together and give us users some nice shiny new toys to play with. Personally, I can't wait - it should spark some interesting developments in the areas of the Web, animation, video and design.


As a friend of mine said in an email this morning, watch out for the world-beating new product - "Flacrobat"!