{"id":63,"date":"2008-07-15T01:14:41","date_gmt":"2008-07-15T06:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/?p=63"},"modified":"2010-04-04T05:44:54","modified_gmt":"2010-04-04T10:44:54","slug":"dreamweaver-cs4-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/2008\/dreamweaver-cs4-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Dreamweaver CS4 Review"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The boys and girls at Adobe recently released a public beta of Dreamweaver CS4 &#8211; and so now, I can freely talk about it!<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been beta testing Dreamweaver CS4 for a little while now and I&#8217;ve been looking forward to spewing my nerd impressions. I had to hold my tongue until Adobe released DW CS4 to the public &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>In this article, I provide a quick overview of what&#8217;s in CS4. But don&#8217;t worry, in soon to come articles and video tutorials, I will be digging deeper.<\/p>\n<p><strong>News:<\/strong><br \/>\nSince I wrote this article, I&#8217;ve put out a few FREE Dreamweaver CS4 video tutorials that demonstrate some of Dreamweaver&#8217;s new capabilities. You can find them here:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/dreamweaver\/dreamweaver-cs4-videos.php\">Dreamweaver CS4 Videos <\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8211;<\/p>\n<h4 class=\"sub-heading\">My first impressions?<\/h4>\n<p>It&#8217;s pretty cool overall. Beyond the general improvements, there are a few really nice features that make Dreamweaver CS4 a worthy upgrade:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Workspaces: expanded and now really easy to change the UI layout on the fly.<\/li>\n<li>Code Navigator: a new feature that makes it dead simple to dig into the code supporting your pages.<\/li>\n<li>Related Files: another new addition that gives you easy access to linked files associated with the document you are currently working on. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Each of the above features are so important that I will be creating a video tutorial for each of them. <\/p>\n<h4 class=\"sub-heading\">A new look and feel<\/h4>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/dw-cs4-ui.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"dw-cs4-ui\" width=\"300\" height=\"250\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-65\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Dreamweaver CS4 introduces a whole new look and feel to Dreamweaver. CS4 now has the uniform Adobe UI called &#8216;OWL&#8217; &#8211; OS Widget Library. The new user interface basically makes Dreamweaver look and act like the other Adobe software packages: Photoshop, Illustrator etc &#8230;<\/p>\n<h4 class=\"sub-heading\">Deprecated \/ removed features<\/h4>\n<p>Dreamweaver is 10 years old and understandably, some of the things that made it into Dreamweaver turned out to not be so useful. So, Adobe made the smart decision (IMHO) to dump the crap so that they could concentrate and new stuff. From Adobe&#8217;s site:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Dreamweaver recently celebrated its 10th birthday with the Creative Suite 3 launch, and after a decade of development there are many features in the application that require significant resources to maintain release to release, but aren&#8217;t being used with significant frequency. Correspondingly, we&#8217;ve recently made some difficult decisions as a tradeoff between continuing to support infrequently used features vs. developing new features to both streamline key web design and development workflows and support newer technologies and development models.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h4 class=\"sub-heading\">So what did they remove?<\/h4>\n<p>    * ASP.NET server behaviors and recordsets<br \/>\n    * JSP server behaviors and recordsets<br \/>\n    * Layout Mode<br \/>\n    * Flash Elements<br \/>\n    * Flash Buttons and Flash Text<br \/>\n    * Site Map<br \/>\n    * JavaBeans<br \/>\n    * ASP.NET server behavior mechanism<br \/>\n    * JSP server behavior mechanism<br \/>\n    * Web Services Panel<br \/>\n    * Timelines <\/p>\n<p>&#8230; Makes sense to me. <\/p>\n<h4 class=\"sub-heading\">Improved Ajax (Spry) and Javascript support<\/h4>\n<p>Adobe has got their collective ear to the ground and so they picked up on the fact that Ajax and Javascript are very important to web design these days &#8211; Web 2.0 anybody? <\/p>\n<p>&#8230; Just in case you are relatively new to the web design world, just understand that Ajax and Javascript are the keys to all the fancy new web wizardry that you see on sites like Google Mail. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/spry.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"spry\" width=\"474\" height=\"78\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-66\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/spry.png 474w, http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/07\/spry-300x49.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 474px) 100vw, 474px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Dreamweaver CS4 has an expanded Ajax capability via their Spry framework and better Javascript editing support complete with more sophisticated code hinting. It&#8217;s pretty easy to create client-side Ajax enabled do-dads like form validation routines etc &#8230;<\/p>\n<h4 class=\"sub-heading\">Conclusion<\/h4>\n<p>So far, I have to say that I like Dreamweaver CS4. The cool new features combined with the more flexible and versatile user interface, makes it easier (and maybe even a touch more fun) to build websites.<\/p>\n<p>PS: did I mention that I have new <a href=\"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/dreamweaver\/dreamweaver-cs4-videos.php\">videos coming out on Dreamweaver CS4<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<p>Stefan Mischook<\/p>\n<p>www.killersites.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The boys and girls at Adobe recently released a public beta of Dreamweaver CS4 &#8211; and so now, I can freely talk about it! I&#8217;ve been beta testing Dreamweaver CS4 for a little while now and I&#8217;ve been looking forward to spewing my nerd impressions. I had to hold my tongue until Adobe released DW [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":489,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.killersites.com\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}