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Web Design & Productivity
Review: Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium
5/29/2007
(Click for larger image.)
The last item of note as far as CSS goes is the new management features that Dreamweaver CS3 offers. Web folk know that there are many options for stashing styles: You can put them in a separate file, surround them with the <style> tag in the head of your page, or place them inline with the rest of the HTML. Dreamweaver CS3 aims to make converting and moving your CSS code relatively painless by offering several options of its own, including drag-and-drop reordering of styles, options to relocate inline styles elsewhere, or move rules into external stylesheets. This feature also worked well in practice; as my pages grew and styles were strewn about like so much confetti, the management features really helped with overall organization.
And in the miscellaneous category, one feature I'll mention is the token nod given to the pervasive mantra of integration that's so prevalent in Flash, Illustrator, and Photoshop. I'm speaking of Dreamweaver's cut-and-paste integration with Photoshop, which is billed as "advanced integration," but is simply a fancy link back to a Photoshop source document even if you've copied just a small area of the source file. However, I found that the feature simply doesn't work correctly. I had no problem copying merged layers out of Photoshop and pasting it into Dreamweaver, but when the time came to edit the source PSD file, Dreamweaver could never locate it. So much for advanced integration.
As for the overall product itself, the main issue isn't so much what's wrong with Dreamweaver CS3, it's that so much is still wrong with Dreamweaver after all these years and versions. One would have hoped that the move to an entirely new programming environment (XCode) to enable Universal Binary compatibility on Intel Macs would have fixed some of the strange and long-standing quirks and display bugs that have plagued prior Mac versions, but it appears that whatever Dreamweaver 8 was is apparently still good enough.
However, one bright spot I did notice is that at least on the Intel Mac version, the overall sluggishness (redraw lags, choppy scrolling, etc.) present in previous versions is now more or less gone; Dreamweaver CS3 is downright responsive and snappy for the most part, though large pages with lots of text still exhibit the occasional lag when placing the cursor and typing in new text. Of course, on Windows, application performance has been much less of an issue, and fortunately, the same holds true for Dreamweaver CS3, even on Windows Vista.
It's a shame that Dreamweaver wasn't given a makeover the way Flash was because it is long overdue for a refresh. However, if you look at the overall product with "fresh" eyes, just because Dreamweaver CS3 isn't significantly better than Dreamweaver 8 (or MX 2004 or MX, for that matter) doesn't mean the product is a bad one; it just means that we're collectively left waiting on long-overdue changes for yet another revision. And while there aren't very many new features, the ones that are present could each represent a strong reason to upgrade, even as the overall presentation of Dreamweaver CS3 as an upgraded product seems very incomplete.
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