Photos by Sydney photographer Daniel Boud
I’ve been using Dreamweaver MX 2004 for about a month now. Thought i’d write about my favourite new features and my overall impressions of it.
I love this feature to bits. Most of the content i receive to put on the web is in Word documents. It’s the bane of every web developers existence, translating Word Docs into HTML. Word produces hideously bloated HTML, and previously when you copy pasted from Word into Dreamweaver you’d lose all styling. You’d have to go through the whole document and re-create tables, add heading styles, bold, italics, links and more. Now you simply copy from Word, paste into Dreamweaver and all the style and tables are in clean HTML. A godsend.
There are a couple of bugs in the copy-paste. I seem to get blank paragraphs between most proper paragraphs so i have to manually remove all those. Plus certain characters are not properly encoded(or encoded at all), for example, em dash (—), en dash (– ), and types of curly quotes (’ ‘ “ ”). This gives me annoying messages in Dreamweaver telling me i should change my character set. Plus, if left them unencoded in the HTML it could cause display problems in the browser window. If you have no idea what i’m talking about, you may want to read this neat article about character encoding.
I’ve been using Dreamweaver on a site i’m building with a pure CSS layout and Dreamweaver is coping admirably. There is a “relevent CSS” panel which shows the CSS rules for wherever your cursor is. You can edit the rules directly in this panel, or you can double click the rule and it’ll open up the css file and jump you directly to the relevent section. That’s a great feature and a real timesaver.
The preview in Dreamweaver (or Design View) usually does a good job of showing how the page will look in the browser. I sometimes get odd behaviour though. All my lists for a particular site were being shown with a black background, there was no CSS rule governing this, and no browser i tested in showed it, but Dreamweaver displayed it. I believe that Dreamweaver uses the Opera rendering engine to display it’s design view. You’d think it’d make more sense to uses Apple’s built in WebCore HTML rendering engine. That way it would display just like Safari, with very good standards compliance. But what would i know.
I’ve got a new Powerbook G4 with 640Mb RAM running OS 10.2.8, this is way above the minimum spec Macromedia provides. Yet Dreamweaver MX 2004 runs frustratingly slow, switching between documents takes a good 2 to 8 seconds. Starting up takes quite a while too. Opening files seems slow. And jumping between code view and design view leaves a frustrating pause while the design view renders. This sluggish performance is a huge hit to my productivity. I’m obviously not the only person suffering this slowness as it’s currently listed as the top emerging issue an the Dreamweaver MX 2004 Tech support site.
I haven’t had any problems with Macromedia’s new Product Activation process. Todd Dominey has and recounts them on his blog. The idea of Product Activation does irk me. I’ve got no problem with conteracting piracy, but if it frustrates paying customers then it’s bad. Plus there’s extra bloat to the application because of the Product Activation, it may even have something to do with why Dreamweaver runs so slowly on my machine.
If it weren’t for the slow performance of Dreamweaver MX 2004 on my machine i wouldn’t hesitate in recommending it. The improved CSS support and Word copy-paste features are great timesavers. But when i have to pause every time i flick through documents it just makes me mad. I do like Macromedia, i get the impression that they understand their customers and listen to their ideas. They seem to be trying to sort out the Mac speed issues. If they do i’ll be a happy camper.