Dreamweaver CS4 Review

For Web Graphic Design Forum of West Michigan

By Steve Gilbert

 

 

This upgrade to Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS3 web site design program has added quite a few new features as well as better integration with the CS4 suite of products. 

The related files feature is one of those things that you have to wonder why it wasn’t there before.   It mimics the way I used to work by having all of the related files open in different tabs, except now I don’t have to keep track of them and do it myself. I love this feature. I think the built in workspaces and the ability to create and save your own workspaces is a great idea, having two monitors I quickly found that Dual Screen was my preferred workspace.   The wealth of built in CSS best practices standards compliant templates is a nice touch. I am a coder so I really like the code completion features for HTML although they did not work exactly the same as the program I was using before I am sure that I will get used to the way it works in Dreamweaver.   On the Javascript side code hinting that is built in is a nice touch It is nice while your designing the site, but when you come back to the site months or years later you will really appreciate the ‘tool’ letting you know what parameters are required for your Javascript procedures. The ability to drag and drop from Photoshop into Dreamweaver is a feature that proves to be a real timesaver.   Rather than having to use the old process of saving graphics for the web and then inserting them into you web pages you simply drag and drop the graphics from Photoshop into your Dreamweaver pages and the web optimization is taken care of for you. The other plus to this is that if you update the graphic within Photoshop the next time you load the page into Dreamweaver it will know that the image has been updated and will allow you to update and optimize the image within your web page. It doesn’t get any better than drag and drop for images.

Live view is interesting but it targets the web kit rendering engine, you can be confident your pages will display properly in Safari or Chrome but you still have to test in other browsers, having said that you can have your default browser set to IE and your alternate browser set to Firefox (or the other way around) and be able to easily test for compatibility on four different browsers from within Dreamweaver. Live Code is interesting, but when you first start using Live View and Live Code it is easy to forget to go back to Design View and wonder why things aren’t working the way you think they should. Code Navigator makes your job easier by taking you directly to the rule where your CSS is defined. As I mentioned before I like to code it myself, but if that’s not your thing creating your rules in the CSS properties panel could not be easier. HTML data sets are interesting, it would indeed be a great way to allow your customers to maintain some dynamic parts of their website without actually giving them access the HTML pages.   I demoed this feature at our meeting it is easy to implement and something you should definitely look into. Device Central allows you to target devices other than computer screens to make sure your pages display correctly, if your targeting the mobile market this will quickly become a must have feature.

·        Adobe Air Authoring Support

·        Enhance Flash Support

·        Spry and AJAX support

·        Subversion Integration

·        Enhanced cross-product integration

·        InContext Editing (add on service)

This is a great product for web design professionals although the interface may take some getting used to if your upgrading from a previous version or another web design product. As I use the Adobe CS4 Suite more I am sure that Flash, Fireworks, and Device Central will come into play as valuable tools.  If you are working on web design more than occasionally, you owe it to yourself to download the Dreamweaver CS4 demo and see if this product is a good fit for you.