Customer Reviews

Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've been using the Dreamweaver CS4 beta for almost 5 months now and find that it fits my work style very nicely. There are some obvious changes like that it now looks more like Adobe's other programs. It's not so much the similarity of looks in the interface that helps as that the working panes and panels have been integrated into a working whole on the Mac in the same way as Windows. Since I use both platforms that's nice. Since the workspace is pretty customizable and since you can save your workspaces, I can imagine that experienced developers will end up having some pretty individualized views. I originally thought that it might take some time to learn the new workspace but it's so logically designed that it seems natural.

If you hand code at all you'll really appreciate the new features. Most of my design work now is focused around building themes and templates for Wordpress and Drupal. Before CS 4 I was hand coding the sites and only used Dreamweaver as a site management tool for static sites. That is to say, not that much. There are a few new features that have changed Dreamweaver from just another arrow in my quiver to my main go to program, Live View and Related files are the two that are getting the most press. They're great but there are some others.

Live View displays a real time look at how the page displays in a WebKit browser. Since Dreamweaver now supports side by side views, on a 20" or larger monitor that allows for simultaneous windows showing the code and the results. I love that.

What makes it even more useful is the Related Files feature. Click on a server side page, like a main CMS template file and Dreamweaver will automatically offer a set of tabs for related server side files, CSS or JavaScript. Click on the sidebar or footer files and the code view shows up. Make a change and Live View updates the preview. This works really well for multi file templates on blogs or content management systems. On the down side, Dreamweaver does not support Ruby or Python so you can't use it for frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django. Though it does work with Cakewalk, a PHP framework. I don't use ASP or ASP.net so can't comment on those or on ColdFusion.

Dreamweaver also now supports syntax highlighting for major JavaScript frameworks. I mostly use jQuery, but MooTools, Scriptaculous and others are supported too. There are some more widgets for Adobe's framework, Spry if you want some built in Ajax.

The last feature that makes a difference for me is Code Navigator. Click on a page element and you can have the associated CSS rules pop up for editing. Brilliant. And the CSS wizards seem to have been updated, too. I find even the best wizard is slower than direct coding so haven't really given that part of the program a good look.

I've also found CS4 to be both a little faster and more stable than CS3 and that's in beta. Hopefully, when I get the boxed copy, I'll experience the same results.

If you use Dreamweaver for designing visually and stay away from working in code you may or may not find the new features quite as exciting as I do, though they aren't trivial. Live View is certainly nice and the improved CSS handling should make it easy to not design with tables. The expanded Spry functionality will make it easier to add Ajax widgets to a page.

I've just upgraded from Dreamweaver 8 to the Adobe CS4 version.

First let me say that all of the wonderful reviews for Dreamweaver CS4 are true - it's just about the best product that money can buy to edit and develop websites. If you want to know why this is a good program go read those reviews - they are accurate. One of my job-titles involves web site design - I've been doing this since the mid 1990's so I've used most of the commercial programs out there at one time or another and the Dreamweaver line of software is a solid product that enables you to build wonderful creations ... BUT:

Some of the 1 star reviews are spot on too - this is not a product for beginners because of one major flaw - documentation. Basically Adobe expect that you'll always have an Internet connection to read the documentation - THERE IS NO MANUAL SUPPLIED WITH THE SOFTWARE (not even a PDF version) and the on-line videos assume that you can hear ... so if you're deaf - this is a very unfriendly product. There is a printed manual - but that will cost you another $50 - you have to buy the documentation separately. On the plus side - there are a large number of "How To" books and web sites available that fill this gap - but Adobe ... well, let's just say that documentation's not their strongest feature.

On the other hand - if you're a long time Dreamweaver user - upgrade, it's magic! You'll find that overall Adobe haven't messed it up too much - it works much the same way as the Macromedia versions did and the upgrade pulls in your old configuration quite nicely. CSS support is much improved - and the "live" view is very helpful. There's no big leap here, they've just made things work better. The review gets 4 stars because of the almost complete lack of decent documentation - otherwise it would be a very solid 5 star product.

Bottom Line: A great product for experts BUT if you are not familiar with Dreamweaver and just dipping your toes into website design then Dreamweaver is not what you're looking for - go and look at a less expensive application - don't waste your money on this product until you can build web sites without needing any documentation.

Dreamweaver combines the simplicity and speed of a visual editor with the precision of a code view. You can develop your websites fast, and still also have the option of tweaking the code to meet your exact wishes.

Trained developers will appreciate the efficiency of getting basic tasks done automatically. Hobbyists and students will appreciate the help, and the opportunity to learn.

Since it's from Adobe, it works well and has plenty of support.

I use Dreamweaver to update my website and to develop my online course, but you can use it for all your coding tasks, from the most basic to the professional. It's easy enough for beginners to use, without the clunkiness of authoring programs designed to be foolproof.

I can't imagine a better choice.

I've said it often, so one more time won't mater: programmers don't know what an end user is. Dreamweacver MX (2002) was about my limit for learning software. CS4 is for geeks and PhDs, and I've got neither to help. The "documentation" is nonexistent of course, so you'll need two computers or a split screen. If you've got an old web site -- as I have -- this program makes it more difficult to change, and it's probably easier to start from scratch. If only they would tell you how.

The videos that are online or on the disk are ridiculous. Two people are sitting at a computer, talking at 60 mph, and making no sense whatsoever. It's a coffee klatch between two geeks speaking ... geek.

If you're going to buy this program, make sure that you have someone who can help guide you and answer even the simplest questions. Like...where did the font color box go on the Properties Box and why do all my forms in CS4 now look different on four out of six browsers (as usual IE) than when I used MX?

And, no, the Dummies books don't work either.

I get the distinct feeling that Adobe wants to keep the independent programmers busy ... if you can find any who can actually understand what YOU need and what YOU do.

Since its initial release in 1997, Adobe Dreamweaver (before Adobe, it was a Macromedia product) has become the industry standard for website creation. When Adobe bought Macromedia in 2005, many hailed it as the beginning of a bright new future, full of love and harmony, between the Adobe suite of products like Illustrator and Photoshop and the former Macromedia products like Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver. Four years later, that bright new future has finally come to pass for Dreamweaver.

So, what does CS4 bring to the table that we haven't seen before? The first thing long-time users will notice it that the user interface has been overhauled and now it looks much more like every other product in the Adobe suite of products. This means tabs, windows and menus all look like you would expect them to look in an Adobe-platform product. Best of all, moving betweens Adobe applications feels effortless and natural, but you'll still be able to find your way around it you have been using Dreamweaver MX, 8 or even CS3. On the contrary, most features from the past versions are right where you would expect them, just in a more Adobe-looking layout and interface.

Speaking of the interface, Dreamweaver CS4 has a very cool, new layout feature for getting your work environment set up just right. These new layouts, which you can get to from a tab in the upper right corner of the screen or from the Windows menu, consist of: App Developer, App Developer Plus, Classic, Coder, Coder Plus, Designer, Designer Compact, and Dual Screen. Each one of these layouts is designed to make working on any specific task much easier by featuring the tools and features that are most relevant in a way that optimizes workflow.

Personally, I think the coolest feature is the Dual Screen layout, which as the name suggests, is a layout made specifically to take advantage of dual monitor configurations. Another excellent feature related to layout is the ability to choose between horizontal and vertical views when working in multiple views. This means that now, instead of having your code above your design, you can have it next to your design, which makes much more sense on a wide screen monitor.

Since we are talking about what makes sense, lets talk about another really fabulous feature in CS4. As anyone who works with modern websites knows, you don't have just an html page anymore. Oh no, nowadays, just for starters, you have your html page and your CSS (cascading style sheet) page/pages. If you're doing anything more dynamic, then you might also have some php, javascript and maybe even Ajax. In the past, you would have had to open components separately, then save and work between files in a way that was not very conducive to being cool, calm and collected. Now, hallelujah, in CS4 when you open a page you are working on, you get a list right below the tab of all the files that your page references. That means that you can open your CSS page on the fly from your html page and make changes without having open the other file in another location. Also, you can open the different code-type pages in the side-by-side view so you can dynamically see what making a change in your CSS will look like on your site. This is an excellent feature and one that you will use all the time.

Also, Dreamweaver CS4 has updated their CSS support. Most seasoned Web Masters often write their own styles but on the occasion if an older version was used to change something on the fly, it was always annoying the way any small change would result in a raft of new styles. In Dreamweaver CS4, the CSS has been greatly improved so that when you do make changes, they are much smarter changes. Another cool feature is the ability to alt-click on an area with Code Navigator to see what styles are affecting that area and then click on them to edit.

Code Navigator is an exciting feature that's makes quick access to server-side includes, external CSS and scripts, template and library items, and i-frame source files quickly and easily available. This feature alone can reduce the most taciturn web designer to a state of giddy joy. Mouse over an item with your little steering wheel icon and viola, there's the underlying code. Click again and your split screen shows you the editable script right where you need to be.

Dreamweaver CS4 also has better Photoshop integration. One feature that we have all missed since the move from Adobe GoLive to Dreamweaver is the ability to use native Photoshop files and have the site images update automatically when you change the original. Well, lo and behold, this feature has return in CS4 as Photoshop Smart Objects. What this means is that now you can edit your original PSD file and an updated version of your graphic can be automatically created for your site with no hassle. This is a huge boon for the web designer.

Another stellar, new feature is the ability to create Adobe AIR applications in Dreamweaver. AIR is a whole review in itself, but basically Adobe AIR allows the user to create Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). You can find more out at [..]

But wait, there's more: the SPRY framework support and Live View. This is a feature that competes nicely with the many available content management solutions on the web. Basically, in Live View you create dynamic websites in Dreamweaver. Previewing changes in real time as you work on CSS and java-based script within the Dreamweaver environment is a marvelous improvement to Dreamweaver. You can also use the Live Code feature to easily look at live, generated code if the placeholder code doesn't show you what you need to see. You can use Code Navigator, Live Code View and split screen features to edit and coordinate external files.

CSS editing with Property Inspector is all grown up in CS4 and working beautifully. Previously, an ugly duckling feature, PI is now a graceful swan. The dialog boxes have been improved. It's a powerful feature and using it requires your full attention--your potential for disaster is as great as your possibilities for improving your workflow. PI doesn't replace full-blown CSS editing, but it's an amazing touchup tool for making a few, quick changes.

The JavaScript extractor feature allows you (the goal is to separate behavior, content, structure, and presentation.) to take any JavaScript local to the HTML page and move it to an externally linked file. There are a couple of options and if you choose "unobtrusive," you'll add additional files.

Dreamweaver CS4 is truly a major upgrade. The new interface is slides this magnificent application comfortably onto the Adobe platform where it belongs. This really is Adobe Dreamweaver now and not just an Adobe-owned Dreamweaver.

Like most of Adobe excellent applications, Dreamweaver is huge and like everything else in life, what your get out of it will depend entirely on what you put into it. If you are an experienced Web professional, you'll appreciate everything Dreamweaver has to offer. If you are a novice, get some training. This is not an entry-level program. If you have been waiting to purchase a version of Dreamweaver or looking for the upgrade that is worth upgrading to, this is it. Dreamweaver has truly arrived.

I've been using Dreamweaver CS4 for the last few months. It has some cool features but for me it's been too hard to use to make it worth switching to from Visual Studio. Things I find difficult to use are:
* It shifts the text area up and down a line when it displays syntax checking errors as you type. Lines of code are usually not yet correct while you're still typing and it's distracting.
* The Find dialog pops up over the code window, often hiding a search result. Finding and replacing text is a common task and you spend a lot of time moving the dialog out of the way.
* Control-Up and Control-Down aren't available.
* Control-Left and Control-Right don't jump in correct whole word increments so you jump around with the arrow keys more than you should need to.

The installation went smoothly. After looking at some Lynda.com "movies" on this product,I am totally overwhelmed. The Adobe product came with no user documentation at all. This company seems to believe in unbundling everything for $$$$$$. When I actually use, then I might change my mind --but so far Adobe is not that customer-friendly.

Try dealing with Adobe customer support! It's not good at all.

I have been using Dreamweaver 8 for years and love everything about it. When time came for my company to upgrade some of our software and start using Dreamweaver CS4, very quickly some major issues were discovered. Quite simply, the only way to format text and other objects on the page is to use style classes as defined either in the head or in an external style sheet. There is no built in support for standard formatting with html in the design interface, but only through cumbersome code pop-ups in the code view screen. This may not sound like much of an issue for most people, EXCEPT if you use this to design email templates. As you may know, most email clients do not support style classes as defined in the head and some, like gmail, won't recognize them at all. Period. Plus our main email program is only HTML 2.0 compliant, so modern code techniques won't work. So now I must go back to using Dreamweaver 8 on my personal laptop to build hundreds of email templates that cannot use style tags in the code view. Adobe is usually awesome in every way, but really dropped the ball on something as simple as support for html formatting.

100% Happy with Dreamweaver. Very easy to use (with a little help from a pro). Like the ease of designing my pages and uploading. I would highly recommend this program for any starting out or advancing in web page design.

I have not used Dreamweaver CS4 very long, but in the short time I have used it (about two months- I used UltraDev 4 previously) I found it to be an excellent product. The only negative thing I've noticed is that for longer uploads it normally does not complete successfully (my file is 269MB). In cases like this, Dreamweaver either disconnects or errors out. I have been using WS_FTP to get around this limitation, with no problems. Of course 269MB is sort of extreme for most people, unless you normally deal with AV files.
My file happens to be a software application I'm selling online.

I love the changes they made to make it easier to edit cascading style sheets, automatically synchronize files, and so on. Of course, there is a vast difference between UltraDev 4 and CS4 so my praises could go on and on and on. Obviously, someone who has just upgraded from CS3 for instance, would not necessarily have as many good things to say about CS4. As as a side note, I started using Dreamweaver way back when they first came out with version 1.0 (when it was still Macromedia), so I might be a little biased, but not much--I have used other packages and none of them are as slick as Dreamweaver.

Also, unlike many other packages, Dreamweaver maintains the integrity of your code etc... and doesn't change it without asking you first.

Going from UltraDev 4 to CS4 is like landing on a different planet--there have been a LOT of changes, all for the better as far as I can tell so far. The interface has gone through a major makeover; it's really slick.

If you're going to use Dreamweaver templates, the upgrade is a must, if you're currently using UltraDev 4. I bought a pre-packaged store for my site and the templates would not work correctly in UltraDev 4 because it didn't recognize the file extensions.

CS4 is a big investment, at least for a start-up business like mine, but I believe it is the best Web Site design software in the business.