Filed under: Reviews, Beta Beat
TUAW Review: Dreamweaver CS4 beta
Adobe Dreamweaver, for better or for worse, is probably the most mature integrated development environment for website building for the Mac. Professionals might be supplied with Dreamweaver through their company's site-license; beginners might get Dreamweaver on the recommendation of a friend. Hard-core coders have their favorite text editors and IDEs. This review is not for them. To be clear, I use Coda and TextMate almost exclusively for web development. This review is for people who use Dreamweaver primarily as a WYSIWYG HTML editor (as much as that makes me cringe). But that's what Dreamweaver does best.
The public beta of Dreamweaver CS4 dropped on Tuesday, and I'm going to show you what's new and different about Dreamweaver CS4, and if it's worth the upgrade.
Weavin' your dreams, after the jump.
First of all, Dreamweaver CS4 is enormous. 509MB of sweet, sweet application. Dreamweaver CS3 was a mere 366MB. Coda is just a wisp of a thing at 52MB. TextMate is practically anorexic at 30MB. For what CS4 provides over CS3, I can't really say that the extra 200MB are doing much. Hopefully that's just test code and cruft that will come out before the final version is released.
Looking at the interface, it's not significantly different than the last version of Dreamweaver (true, it's just as customizable as the last one, too). Palettes are organized similarly, with one major difference. The Insert palette now lives down with the rest of the palettes, instead of as a toolbar above the workspace.
One nifty addition is a small tab-like toolbar above the workspace that shows documents (like stylesheets and scripts) linked in the current document. No need to thrash through your document structure to find a buried CSS file: it's listed right next to your open document at the top.
Before I switched to Coda, I used Dreamweaver (in its various iterations, including CS3) since Dreamweaver 3, I think (note to readers: I am old). I'm very familiar with how it works. As I grew in my career, I moved away from the WYSIWYG development process, and started coding by hand. Dreamweaver was a fair-to-middling text editor, and the code view's maturity as part of the Dreamweaver product definitely shows in CS4.
Still, certain features like Coda's terminal integration and visual CSS editor would be a welcome addition to Dreamweaver.
Another addition is the Code Navigator, a contextual menu that shows you the CSS properties of the item you clicked. No more switching to Firebug to find out what styles are assigned to a particular object. A helpful (Firebug-like) addition to this pop-up might be to show which styles are overridden by others.
For me, the most anticipated feature is Live View, a preview environment (much like Coda's) that renders the web page as if it was in Safari, Camino, OmniWeb (thanks commenters!) or the raft of other browsers that use the WebKit engine. The disappointment is this: the Design view (that is, the WYSIWYG environment) doesn't use WebKit, but the same rendering engine as the last version of Dreamweaver. As a result, Live View is given a strange "separate but equal" preview status. I think it would be great to make WebKit the rendering engine for all of Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG output, furthering the push toward design for standards compliance.
Even so, testing is at least easier, obviating the need to switch from IDE to browser and back again.
Overall, Dreamweaver is a mature HTML development environment. The changes to the environment shouldn't have to be radical to be useful. In fact, Adobe is helping the development community push more towards standards compliance, which is great for everyone: developers and visitors alike.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
frogbat said 8:22AM on 5-29-2008
thnx for the sneak peek as a designer rather than developer - wysiwyg apps like dweaver are a salvation.
my main question is what was performance like. Granted that it's an early beta but has it shown any improvements over cs3 in app switching etc?
I'm in two minds regarding the switch to webkit. On one hand i'm sure it improves the process when building tho on the other hand, cs3 and its predecessors often gives me a good approximation of what the page will look like on ie6 browsers. Tho having said that I target firefox these days and then work in the tweaks for ie 6 and 7.
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Robert Palmer said 9:47AM on 5-29-2008
On my Intel iMac, performance was about the same as CS3. This may mean that once Adobe removes the beta cruft that performance will be better.
chesama said 8:24AM on 5-29-2008
it's great that you use one thing over another, but most of your comments seem a lot like "well i program actionscript with flex, so i don't see why you'd use flash".
as a designer, dreamweaver comes in handy. true, i never use the design-only view, and i spend a lot of time in the code view and tweak the automatic code regularly. but to get the design view helps.
it'd be nice if this was reviewed by someone who actually uses dreamweaver regularly.
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Robert Palmer said 9:47AM on 5-29-2008
Your full refund is in the mail. :)
Quine said 8:30AM on 5-29-2008
Camino uses gecko I believe, not webkit.
Pretty good review. I'll stick with textmate and coda though
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Tom said 8:32AM on 5-29-2008
A nice review :) CS4 looks interesting so far then...
One small thing though, Camino uses the Gecko engine, like Firefox, doesn't it? Not that there's a huge visual difference, but just to mention...
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Adam S said 9:20AM on 5-29-2008
Tom - You're right, there is no question about it: Camino uses Gecko, period. Safari and Shiira are the big Webkit engines for Mac.
chris said 8:55AM on 5-29-2008
adobe cs3 suite is gigantic and does nothing more than newer competing, modern programs like gimp, acorn, coda, cssedit, pixelmator. once a real1 alternative to flash professional is out, they'll be no reason for even pro users to use adobe's creative suite. so much of their programs contain old/windows code, whereas REAL programs like coda are clean and easy.
i am now using coda and acorn instead of dreamweaver and photoshop and i love it.
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Joe said 9:23AM on 5-29-2008
Chris, I haven't used acorn, code, or cssedit so I won't speak to those, but gimp and pixelmator are definitely not suitable professional replacements to photoshop and illustrator.
Matt said 10:29AM on 5-29-2008
@ Adam
Agreed. I'm not even a professional designer, and I use Pixelmator at home for things that aren't as important, but even I can see that neither Gimp nor Pixelmator have anywhere near the power of Photoshop.
Not that I'm saying everyone needs photoshop, and I will concede that for most people these alternatives may have more than enough features. But to say no one ever needs any of Adobe's tools is rediculous.
Matt said 10:30AM on 5-29-2008
Whoops. Hit reply on the wrong comment. Sorry.
frogbat said 9:08AM on 5-29-2008
chris... in an ideal world that might be the case and that is what competition aims to bring. Though heavy competition in a capitalist market which preaches the dog eat dog mentality, ironically, brings about monopolies such as Adobe's.
One thing that the cs 3 suite has going for it, that all the other apps u mention can't hold a candle to, is the tight integration between the apps. I can copy and paste between ai and pshop and fireworks and flash etc. On the fly.
In a multi disciplined studio it is important to have ui and compatibility consistency. Also, not every person and designer out their are willing or capable of adapting to different apps unless they have to. I'm a geek and I love to play around with diff apps. But getting my designers to switch from freehand was a heartbreaking situation. My point is, that at times having industry standard apps is important even for training.
tuaw's recent group review of vector based apps showed the lack of a contender to ai for example. These small and open source apps are still too young to compete.
and there's an old adage that goes - give me a flawed adobe product over a working ms one any day! (ok maybe i just came up with that)
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SubGenius said 9:32AM on 5-29-2008
Coda + CSSEdit = Win
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Chris Newton said 10:14AM on 5-29-2008
Coda+CSSEdit... it's a shame that Coda's CSS editor totally sucks compared to CSSEdit. I quit using Coda, mainly because it's preview can't render flash, and its CSSEditor is pretty ugly compared to CSSEdit's. TextMate+CSSEdit+Safari+Terminal+YummyFTP = Win... & bloat, and lots of app switching. I'm rooting for Coda, but it's not a contender yet.
Regarding Dreamweaver: I used it for years, but I had to give it up because it just seemed like I was always trying to work around it, rather than with it. Since I keep buying it, I keep considering that I should buy a reference book and try to learn it anew. Maybe it's possible that it could speed up my workflow, but as of yet, each iteration seems to make things more time consuming for an established designer/developer, rather than less.
Derek said 3:29PM on 5-29-2008
It's a shame CSSEdit isn't built into Coda (that was Panic's original intent, but the deal didn't work out.)
Brett Terpstra said 4:31PM on 5-29-2008
@Chris Newton: Sweet. As many times as I've been through this argument, I rarely find people who use the exact same setup as I do. Throw in a little svn and keyed ssh/scp, and I'm coding all night.
Sean Flanagan said 10:15AM on 5-29-2008
Robert, how's the output in CS4? CS3 certainly improved the code, but it still required quite a bit of cleanup to validate.
Also, reset.css FTW.
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Robert Palmer said 10:28AM on 5-29-2008
I made a few changes to an existing HTML page, and they were pretty clean. Adding paragraphs still adds blank everywhere, but that's to be expected.
It still hard-wraps long lines and does not encode special characters by default, but that is a preference you can set. The layout templates are the same as CS3, and still validate.
My guess is, with a reasonably intense page, you'd still have to do some cleanup. You'd have to do that with any WYSIWYG editor, though.
Brian said 10:20AM on 5-29-2008
Why do you feel the odd need to establish your "street cred" as a hand-coder? All that does is diminish my faith in your ability to produce an at least _reasonably_ objective review of the application? Just review the damn thing, or hand it to someone who uses DreamWeaver on a semi-regular basis.
Starting an article with a profession of your bona fides as a Dreamweaver-phobe is probably not ideal.
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Robert Palmer said 10:36AM on 5-29-2008
It's not a question of street-cred at all. And never did I say I was afraid of Dreamweaver. It's called full disclosure. I don't use the WYSIWYG part of Dreamweaver much anymore, and would appreciate if it went away entirely. My opinion is that web development should be treated like application development, with a respect for good, solid code. WYSIWYG editors, without supervision, make bad code.
If the number-one goal of any professional web designer is to produce good code (by whatever means they choose), then I want to make sure that audience is well-served by the review, because that's how they'll be using the app.
If you're not in that category, then that's fine. Please, though, email me when you review the app. I'd love to read what you think.