4 stars (Still the best of the WYSIWYG field) - Dreamweaver consistently ranks high in the field of WYSIWYG web site editors. This release does not stray from this position. Considering GoLive and FrontPage are the current competition, it is not hard to see why (will be interesting to see what comes out with Microsoft Expressions Quartz).
As with previous versions, Dreamweaver 8 has the standard Dreamweaver interface. When you install, you have the option of setting up like a developer or setting up like a designer. It is not as easy to change the scheme (or not as evident), but this is not a major deal as a single developer rarely changes the setup of his development environment.
Dreamweaver 8 touts itself as the king of CSS and it has certainly made some wonderful inroads. By default, you can create styles in a page or in a stylesheet. Unfortunately, it falls a little short in allowing you to change your mind in this place, as well. It would be nice, for example, to drag tested styles from a test page up to the stylesheet. Instead, I have to manually cut and paste or recreate styles. Yes, this is minor, but can't someone make a tool that does this? I would also love to see a tool that recognizes I have already created a style with the same feature or allows me to use the standard font and paragraph changes and automatically create a style. But, I digress, there is no tool that does that ... yet.
The CSS Styles tab gives you a great way of getting down to the properties of a particular CSS style. If you do not want to bring up the designer, which is how you normally create your style, you simply add properties to the style in the CSS Styles tab. Very nice feature. A little different than the properties view in MS products, but much more compact.
Dreamweaver 8 is better at .NET development than FrontPage. It also allows a variety of other development paradigms: ASP (either VBScript or JavaScript), ASP.NET (C# or VB.NET), ColdFusion, JSP and PHP (with MySQL). This makes it a good all around tool for development. I would still not trade my Visual Studio, but Dreamweaver gives me a lot of bang for my buck and Visual Studio has a horrible design surface (at least in the latest implementation - VS 2005).
Dreamweaver still has the best behaviors (client side scripting), but they have not made any real inroads to new functionality in this regard. This has been a major selling point to me in the past and I wish they would have included something to help with AJAX (Asynch JavaScript and XML).
Of the new features, I find the CSS most compelling (mentioned above) and also very aggrevating (Macromedia did not take them far enough for my likings). You also have the ability to zoom on design and use guides (good for CSS layouts). There is also a better Flash integration and collapsable code regions. None of these are grand enough for me to personally take the upgrade plunge.
Down to the nitty gritty. Here are the questions you are probably wanting to know the answer to.
1. Should you buy Dreamweaver (assuming you do not already own a previous version)? It really depends. If you do not have a tool, this is still the best on the market. If you have FrontPage, you might get Dreamweaver if you need the flexibility of working outside of the Microsoft world, otherwise I would say no. The same is true if you have GoLive, as it has many similar features.
2. Should you upgrade? This really comes down to a few features and how important they are to you.
A) If you are heavy on CSS, you might want to upgrade, although I am not sure that this is the best option unless Macromedia really fills in this area. It was not quite enough for me to feel compelled to move on right now.
B) Use a lot of flash? The time savings might be a good reason to move to this version.
C) Need productivity helps, like code collapse, guides and the ability to zoom in on your design? This is the only tool I know of currently that has these features.
Dreamweaver 8 is a good product. If I did not have a previous version, I would seriously consider the cost and bite the bullet, as I feel it is worth the price ($399 street). But, I do not see it worth the $199 street price for the upgrade, aty least not for me. The additional CSS is nice, but it is not enough of a productivity change for me to justify the cost, esp. when I am fairly fast at working with CSS without the additional features.
5 stars (Much Improved) - This version of Dreamweaver is mounds better than 2006. It loads just as fast as MX did, runs flawlessly and stable, just like MX did. MX 2006 sucked, plain and simple. It was buggy, slow, and it had all that activation crap processes running in the background. I must have counted a total of 3 extra processes running just for Dreamweaver to run. Just for the crappy licensing. CSS has been better intergrated and so has flash video. This is definetly worth the upgrade. Being as how adobe just bought macromedia, i imagine the versions are only going to get crappier since adobe has no competition now. So i'd upgrade to this one while you have the chance, as no other web editing software really compares to dreamweaver.
5 stars (Clean, fast, efficient... more productive) - Having used Dreamweaver for many years, as both a design and coding (PHP) tool... it was wonderful to begin using 8 and right away noticing the MAJOR improvements.
Most noteably it seems that they got rid of a lot of the "bloat" that made MX so sluggish. Another major plus is the posting window that puts along in the background, freeing DW up to continue working on other things.
Thoroughly impressed so far. Have not played too much with new CSS support but looking forward to seeing improvements there as well. |
