Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 [OLD VERSION]

Other products by Macromedia

Product Features

• The professional choice for building web sites and applications
• A powerful combination of visual layout tools, application development features, and code editing support
• Developers and designers can create appealing, standards-based sites and applications quickly
• Developers can use it with the server technology of their choice to build powerful Internet applications
• Includes leading support for CSS-based design to hand-coding features

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000CAV4Q
• Date first available at Amazon.com: August 25, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #4,529 in Software (See Bestsellers in Software)

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• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Product Description

Dreamweaver MX 2004 builds more powerful Internet applications, more quickly than ever! Increased support for XML, ASP.NET, PHP and other modern development technologies

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

121 of 126 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A BIT UNDERWHELMING. I'D WAIT FOR NEXT UPGRADE., October 15, 2003

By	Shashank Tripathi (Gadabout) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I've been designing with DW for a while now. The 2004 upgrade remains essentially the same, except for a few changes:

[1] The default is now CSS. If you want a tables based layout, you can still work with it but a change needs to be made in the preferences.

[2] The previous Dreamweaver MX supported CSS-P to a degree but editing it wasn't always easy. MM were obviously aware of Dreamweaver's rendering problems and for the new version, have borrowed upon Opera's rendering engine to do some of the hard work and it's now several magnitudes better.

[3] Secure FTP built in

[4] Microsoft Word and Excel copy and paste. Earlier version would lose the formatting when text was pasted inside DW. In this sense, DW now equals Frontpage

[5] On-the-fly cross-browser compatibility checking

[6] Some simple image editing like cropping and tonal adjustments without leaving the program

All this is fine and dandy, some of these features are also a god-send, but the CSS handling is a bit quirky yet. Surely, there must be a simpler and more intuitive way to do all this? There's far too much jumping around the interface required. Instead of providing one really inspired WYSIWYG way to do things, it seems to offer a multiplicity of mediocre alternatives, almost as if the programmers couldn't make their minds up and say, 'Hell, we'll put it all in'. That is a recipe for camels, not thoroughbred racehorses.

If you know your way around Dreamweaver already, you might welcome the new CSS editing facilities but 50% of the full price for an upgrade seems grossly excessive. I'm a bit disappointed that after all this time, Macromedia have produced something that is okay, but not great.

Besides, in the rush for an upgrade (now that GoLive is getting its own feet too) MM seems to have settled for some degree of bloat. My DW updated to 2004 MX is even more of a RAM hog than before.

Net net: I'd wait for the next version upgrade, by when hopefully MM would have tied in all these loose ends.

67 of 71 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great Upgrade, but . . ., May 14, 2004

By	Timothy Ryberg (Duluth, MN USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm one of those people who tends to upgrade their more expensive software every other versaion rather than every one. That being said I've used both DreamWeaver 2 and 4, but never MX (5).

I didn't notice a lot of improvement in version 4 over 2, so I wasn't that anxious to do the upgrade. But I have to say that I love MX 2004! I won't go into an extensive list of things that I can do in this one that I couldn't before, but suffice it to say, there are a lot of them.

The biggest improvements to me are the more integrated workplace and the ditching of the floating palets. I hated the floating palets! I used the drop-down menues instead because they bugged me so much! I also love the improved FTP/Site Management interface. Secure FTP, people!

The tool is slick and powerfull. Well worth the cost to upgraders. The bad thing: It doesn't like my Amazon Associates code! It tags them as invalid HTML and ignores them when it uploads the site. As a result, I still have to edit those pages in FrontPage and uplaod the site using a traditional FTP client. Not good (this is why it only gets 4 stars).

Also, in the next version Macormedia should add an "as you go" spell checker or at least put a button for spell check on one of the button bars. This is another thing I use FrontPage for. I edit my more text intensive pages in FP and then import them into Dreamweaver.

Don't waste your money on the full suite, though. With the exception of DreamWeaver, none of them are worth the money. I'm glad I qualified for the Academic version (and discount).

The tools are overrated and over priced. If you're a web designer there are free or inexpensive tools that do what you need from Freehand and Fireworx. (I am no fan of Microsoft, but after trying several tooks, I do most of my web photo editing in Picture It!) The one feature I use from Fireworx is the button creator. The rest of it's extranious. Flash may look nice, but it slows your site down too much for my taste. I almost always skip the Flash animation when I visit a website.

Bottom line -- Buy DreamWeaver, but skip the suite.

This is a review if the PC version.

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars It looks pretty, but sooooooo slow!, October 25, 2003

By A Customer

Yes, the new Dreamweaver indeed looks great... Unfortunately, that's where my praise for this product ends. I have used DW off-and-on since version 3, and used it hardcore since MX was released last year. When MX was released in 2002, I noticed a little bit of a performance slowdown, but nothing too cumbersome. Besides they added alot of new features in MX, so a little slowdown was to be expected. However, with MX 2004, only a handful of new features have been added, and these features are really more "convenience" features than blatant necessities.

MM added this new tag parsing feature that automatically goes through the entire document and pulls a list of tag attributes each time you switch to a different tag. So, let's say you're at a TABLE tag, and then click on a IMG tag. The program will go through and make this list of attributes and CSS options. Decent idea, but it is SO SLOW!! I am very disappointed with how poorly this software functions. My computer is still fairly fast (1.3Gig, 512 RAM), and I am disappointed to see how ineffective this program is. Unlike going from V4 to MX, there is really no need to upgrade to MX 2004 if you already own MX. I downloaded the trial and considered purchasing the suite, but I don't think I will be making this purchase now.

Unless you really need the latest and (not so) greatest tool, I would pass on this one and stick with the original MX version.

FYI, Macromedia has gone the way of other vendors and requires you to register the product online with a unique serial code.