Dreamweaver MX-Mac

Other products by Macromedia

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000066EUD
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 29, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #13,674 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #13 in	Software > Web Development > Web Effects > Objects
  #22 in	Software > Macintosh > Web Development > Web Page Editors
  #40 in	Software > Macintosh > Web Development > Web Effects

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review
Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX is a topflight Web editor for dynamic sites as well as static pages. Dreamweaver's excellent visual tools generate code that works across all the leading Web browsers, winning it the respect of professionals. Its availability on the Mac as well as Windows is another strong feature for designers. The product is also extensible, with a huge range of third-party add-ons available from Macromedia's Web site, many of them free of charge. There is great support for Internet standards, including cascading style sheets, XHTML, and accessibility features. Built-in validating mechanisms make it easy to check a page, and everything is highly configurable so you can specify the standards you want to support.

This is a visual editor, which means you can create and edit a Web page by selecting items such as tables, forms, and images from a tabbed palette. The Properties panel lets you specify details such as borders, styles, and hyperlinks, and you can also use the visual editor for frames and layers. Many designers also like to edit the underlying HTML, and this is where Dreamweaver MX comes into its own. It supports either a pure code view or a split view that lets you click seamlessly between the code and visual editors. A lot of the features previously found in HomeSite, Macromedia's text-based Web editor, are now integrated into Dreamweaver, including pop-up code hints, a snippets panel that lets you keep handy pieces of code for reuse, and a tag chooser that lets you grab the right tag from a list. An O'Reilly tag reference is built in.

Dreamweaver's template support deserves special mention. Templates give you a quick start with a number of predesigned pages. In Dreamweaver MX, they can also be used to lock down areas of the page, so that contributors can create and edit a story without disturbing the design. Templates can be nested so that changes to an underlying template ripple through the pages that use it for powerful site-wide updates.

Macromedia used to market a product called Dreamweaver UltraDev, which allowed for rapid development of Web applications featuring online databases, member login, and other server-side elements. In Dreamweaver MX, this capability is built in. It has also been extended, adding support for ASP.NET and PHP as well as ColdFusion, JavaServer pages, and traditional ASP. Nonspecialists will find themselves able to build rich dynamic pages, while the integrated code editor makes this a capable development product as well. In fact, Dreamweaver MX has also replaced ColdFusion Studio as the primary development tool for ColdFusion MX. It is a uniquely flexible package.

Overall, it's hard to find fault with Dreamweaver MX. It's true that its complexity and professional features make it harder to pick up than some rival products. The abundance of panels and options can be confusing, and a high-resolution screen is required. In addition, the Studio MX products, which include Dreamweaver, are a better value for those who need more than one of the MX series. However, this takes nothing away from the excellence of Dreamweaver as the first-choice tool for professionals. --Tim Anderson

Amazon.com Product Description
Build Web sites and Internet applications with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Work within one environment to easily create and manage any professional Web site, whether it's built using HTML, XHTML, XML, Web services, ColdFusion, ASP.NET, ASP, JSP, or PHP. Dreamweaver MX is a complete solution combining the visual layout tools of Dreamweaver, the Web application features of Dreamweaver UltraDev, and the code editing support of HomeSite.

The new integrated workspace shared with Macromedia Flash MX and Fireworks MX includes tabbed document windows, dockable panel groups, customizable toolbars, and integrated file browsing. Prebuilt layouts and code, including site structures, forms, accessible templates, and JavaScript functions for interactivity, allow you to get started fast. A site setup wizard helps configure site information instantly for managing dynamic sites, staged sites, or sites hosted by ISPs.

Write code faster than ever before using features like code hints, tag editors, extensible color coding, tag choosers, snippets, and code validation. Accelerate development with support for XML, including creating, editing, validating XML code, and importing XML schemas. Easily introspect XML Web services. Ensure standards compliance with default creation of XHTML output, easy conversion from standard HTML to XHTML, and increased support for CSS2.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WYSIWYG is what the Mac is famous for., May 10, 2002

By	Michael A. Brown "maniacmedia" (Salt Lake City, UT USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Dreamweaver has been my choice for web editing since I figured out what I was doing. I started with Adobe PageMill, so the logical step should have been GoLive. But, I had a choice and Dreamweaver won out.

Combining the functionality of Dreamweaver, and the dynamic engine of UltraDev, MX completes this program's journey to what the web should be. Roundtrip editing for Flash MX and Fireworks MX as well, make these programs a designer's dream suite.

Macromedia has made me a fan for life with the latest updates. Fully compatible with both OS X and OS 9. (This review is based on the pre-release download version.)

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Slower and buggier than previous versions, if more powerful., August 6, 2002

By	Arryman "arryman" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

On the good side, we finally have OS X versions of these mainstay web design apps (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash); on the bad side, they are so buggy that one wonders if OS 9 was really that bad at all. Overall, Dreamweaver on my G4/733 feels MUCH slower than 4.01 did on a G3/333.

For example, the behavior of dragging the panels on the right side is very inconsistant. E.g., when attempting to resize the CSS panel to be longer to show more styles in my file, the cursor often does not turn into the double-headed arrow to indicate dragability; or the cursor disappears completely; dragging sometimes works, but more often doesn't. Or, when in code view, dragging across text to select results in a nasty redraw problem, with the code flashing on and off in rapid succession until you've stopped dragging. It's like the document is having an epilectic seizure. And why haven't they put in a simple window split function? BBEdit has had this for years. They boast about how bit-chin' their HTML code view is, but jeeze, it leaves a lot to be desired (and no, I don't think switching to BBEdit should be a solution to that; I think Macromedia should do more than a half-baked job on the code editor, and then most of us wouln't need to bother with BBEdit). Or, in the Style Sheet edit window, styles are unordered, making it very hard to find a particular style.

And basic functions like launching the app, quitting, opening a file, opening the Site view, saving as, and so forth, are S - L - O - W. It's just a drag to use this software. We should be damanding far more from our application creators like Macromedia.