Review: Dreamweaver MX Part 1: The Application

Product Name/Version: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX
OS X ?: Heck Yes
Company: Macromedia
URL: http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver
Category: Commercial Graphic & Web Application
Price: $399 or $799 in Studio MX (packaged with Dreamweaver MX, Freehand 10 & Flash MX)
Requirements:
- Power Macintosh G3 Processor
- Mac OS 9.1 or higher, or OS X 10.1 or higher
- 64MB of free available system RAM (128MB recommended)
- 80MB Disk Space
Date of Review: 9/20/02
Rating: Overall: 4 bounces - Pure Lust

Without exaggerating, I can honestly say that Dreamweaver MX is the killer ap for Web design. The latest release from Macromedia adds the database functionality of Ultradev to the standard release of Dreamweaver, and adds some nice extras and a redesigned user interface. MX is the first release of the software that truly caters to the entire spectrum of web designers and developers from flat-out newbies to the hardcore database coders.No matter your skill level, you can be comfortable in Dreamweaver quickly, and the application adjusts to fit your expanding knowledge of Web design.

I recently had a conversation with some hardcore Wintel FrontPage folks who grilled me extensively about Dreamweaver MX, and I found myself repeating the phrase "yeah, it can do that," with the occasional smirky addition "and it WORKS in Netscape and on Mac browsers, too."

Because of the sheer size and power of Dreamweaver MX, I'm just going to have space to scratch the surface of the newest version in Part 1 of this review, which will continue with examples and tutorials of practical application of the MX Studio. I'm also going to speak from the context of designer and educator, and I'll be the first to admit, I'm not nearly up to speed on some of the developer and server technologies, so be a little patient. So, with this in mind, let's get started.

Features

This is going to both be a list of the new features in MX, and revisions to some of the old standards that make Dreamweaver a solid performer.

The Site Window: If you want to commit web-design hari-kari, don't set up one of these. With a little practice, you can easily maintain both a large or small site inside this window, ensuring all your links are valid and later uploading the site to your server.

Site Control: Dreamweaver encourages you to build a "Site" for each website you maintain, giving you quick and easy access to all files in you site root, as well as a new built-in file browser to the rest of your computer.

The Dreamweaver Site goes first in this review because it represents the kind of power that Dreamweaver brought to developers and designers a long time ago - and Macromedia continues to refine and redefine what can be accomplished through the Site.

The Site functions as a clearinghouse for all your local links to images and files, an FTP program to upload your files to your remote server, and an organzational tool for teams to share the workload on a single Site from different computers without overwriting each other's work.

The MX Site adds a "Computer" icon underneath the local root folder, allowing you to quickly and easily add external files to your root folder inside Dreamweaver - thus eliminating the need to jump out to the Finder everytime you need to move a file into your Site.

Redesigned Interface: The entire MX suite of applications use a new system of dockable panels, which I'll admit required a little initial adjustment on my part. Instead of dropping and dragging panels to create new panel groups, you click the panel options menu in the upper right corner of a panel to create and customize panel groups. After a few minutes of experimentation (god forbid I [gasp] look in the manual) I managed to create the panel groups that make up my current comfort zone.

The old Objects panel has been replaced by the new Insert panel - which I have grown to LOVE. It now quickly displays all the goodies that one can plop onto a page with a horizontal tabbed format - rather than the magic "I had no idea that was there" Objects panel method of previous iterations of Dreamweaver. The organization of this panel is nicely thought-out and designed - and totally customizable if you are so inclined.

The Insert Panel: the new Insert panel has a ton of icons to insert all the goodies you could imagine. OK, it can't insert a flying pig - but you could insert Flash, animated gif, or rollover images of a flying pig.

The interface is also delightfully aquafied, except for one notable exception: the little red "close" dot does not get the "dot" that signifies an unsaved document. Of course - the page title area gets an asterisk after an unsaved file name like previous versions of Dreamweaver. Still, I miss that little dot in the red close doohickey.

CSS Enhancements: For those of us who use Cascading Style Sheets, Dreamweaver MX has some nice improvements for editing and applying CSS to page elements and tags. First off, you can set the CSS Styles panel to two modes: Apply Styles and Edit Styles. Gone is the annoying little "Apply" checkbox of yesteryear - which caused me to inadvertently apply styles to page elements when I simply wished to edit the style. Now I leave the panel in Edit Mode nearly all the time.

Why leave the panel in Edit mode? Because you can now Apply CSS styles right in the Property Inspector. This is so cool, I actually shrieked like a ten year old girl when I figured this out. The students outside my office thought I had lost my mind again - but this feature just rocks. Just click on the little "A" icon in front of the font menu, and the menu changes to apply CSS styles. This is like magic to me, and when I give the students the charge to edit and format all the text in their site using only style sheets, this gives them an almost unfair advantage.

The Properties Inspector (aka the lifesaver): This is the gold standard in context sensitive panels, going way back to early versions of Dreamweaver. No matter what page element you have selected, you can customize it thoroughly in this panel. You can see the new CSS mode above - instead of normal font formatting tools, here I picked the "article_title" style for a line of text.

Accessibility: I can't commend Macromedia enough on making sure all MX Studio components have improved accessibility support. You can configure Dreamweaver to prompt you to fill out ALT and accessibility tags as you insert images, tables, frames, form objects, and various media. You can pick and choose what prompts your receive in the Accessibility section of Dreamweaver's preferences. This would be enough to impress me, but the fact that Dreamweaver is compliant with screen reader software brings accessibility not only to Web users, but to developers as well. Bravo, Macromedia.

JavaScript Pop-up menus: Hey, new gewgaws! Actually, pop-up menus are a fabulous way to enhance navigation - both in functionality, and to increase the user's understanding of your site structure. Either way, a well-conceived pop-up menu can be a boon to both the designer and the end user.

And - they are really easy to create. You will need to create either linked text or a linked image, apply the "show pop-up menu" behavior, and then following the tabbed windows to set it up. Easy and cool.

Enhanced Templates: Templates have matured quite a bit since Dreamweaver 4 with the added abilities toadd repeating regions for multiple instances of the same editable region on a page. You can also nest editable regions inside other editable and repeating regions - allowing for further customization.

A practical application of this is to have a table with specific editable regions repeat thoroughout a page - for a calendar, or resume or whatever turns your fancy.

To add even more levels of customization, you can set specific tag attributes to be editable - such as allowing a content manager to customize the color of text, but not the size or typeface. Or allow the table background color to be changed, but not the table width.

For the truly advanced users that can understand and write javascript and Dreamweaver template tags, Optional Template Regions can be created for dynamic customization of a page. This is a little beyond me at the moment, but it appears that one could create scripts that insert new regions automatically depending on what other content is present on the page. Pretty heady stuff for a WYSIWYG editor - and very representative of how Dreamweaver has a feature set for every level of user.

Hardcore Support for server and emerging technology: I'm still learning the new server technologies, and deciding where to focus my attention in this arena. Whatever your chosen arena, Dreamweaver MX seems to already support it: ColdFusion, ASP.NET and JSP all have unique support features; PHP, XML, and XHTML all have included native support. Basically, if you have a platform to develop, this is the application for you.

Compatibility & Workflow

I'm going to speak from experience here, based on almost 6 years of professional web design experience. Dreamweaver has always been terribly compatible with both browsers on both platforms. I rarely have issues with tables not drawing as expected, or features not working in both browsers in both the Mac and Windows platforms. It's hard to improve on a near-perfect record of cross-platform-browser compatibility, yet Macromedia seems awfully determined to make my lectures about creating compatible and predictable Web sites obsolete.

Having used MX to redesign the University Web templates that will be making a premiere later this year, I found myself having almost nothing to tweak after the initial creation and testing sessions. In fact, the only things I needed to adjust were things I was experimenting with - tables and text drew beautifully, and I think we are going to have a much easier time implementing these templates University-wide if we can get the various technology committees to agree to MX as a university standard.

And I do mean MX, because as robust as Dreamweaveris alone, combined with Fireworks MX it is an incredibly powerful tool for round-trip Web site development. Having said that, I'll be the first to admit that I still build initial concepts in Photoshop, but as soon as the initial concept is approved, I import the photoshop file into Fireworks, where the magic happens. After Fireworks, it's into Dreamweaver for layout and content, with occasional forays back into Fireworks for some light image and Fireworks source editing.

I've used the competition's tools, and found them lacking in stability, compatibility, and features. Would I recommend Dreamweaver to folks? Heck yes - I'm evangelizing University-wide adoption as a pre-tenure faculty member, so you better believe it! I purchased 50 licenses of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash MX for my lab computers as soon as the budget was available.

Summary

I do have one gripe with Dreamweaver MX - that it does feel a bit sluggish in OS 10.1. However, upgrading to 10.2 has greatly enhanced performance on all my machines, and it's kicking butt in my lab on G4 iMacs using NetInfo based preferences. I give Dreamweaver MX a Pure Lust rating for all levels of users.

NEXT UP:

We'll take a closer look at some features in use as I walk you through a workflow tutorial from Photoshop to Fireworks to Dreamweaver. We'll start with a photoshop concept, build functionality and accessibility in Fireworks, tweak the layout in Dreamweaver, create a template to speed the workflow, and finally add CSS to format content site-wide. Stay tuned...

- Joel Davies

What do you think? Talk about it in our Forums...

MacBook Pro (5-17-06) Dr. Neale Monks. A subjective review of the MacBook Pro
Freeway 4 Pro (2-28-06) Dr. Neale Monks. Freeway Pro, the Quark-like web design program from Softpress, has been substantially revised and sports a bright new look. But do the changes go more than skin deep? Neale Monks finds out.
Astrostack (1-18-06) Dr. Neale Monks. Long respected as one best astronomical image processing applications about, in its newest incarnation AstroStack now runs on the Macintosh. Has the wait been worthwhile?
Virtual PC 7 (11-23-05) Dr. Neale Monks. Virtual PC 7 is the update to the venerable Windows emulator to be entirely all Microsoft’s own work. Can Mac users expect to see any dramatic changes?
Eudora Pro 6.2 (8-5-05) Dr. Neale Monks. Eudora has been one of the most popular e-mail clients for the Macintosh for more than a decade. Neale Monks finds out how it compares with the Mail application that comes with OS X
MacAstronomica (4-22-05) Dr. Neale Monks. How does this amateur naked eye astronomy software stack up?
iKey 2.0 (3-11-05) Jeremy Young. How well does this automation utility work? How much time will you save?
Wolfram Research Publicon (3-11-05) Jeff Terry Does this new scientific word processor live up to the potential?
Microsoft Office 2004, Part 3, Word (1-28-05) Dr. Neale Monks. Are there enough new features to necessitate a jump from v.X?
REALbasic 5.5 (12-03-04) Dr. Neale Monks. Neale takes a look at the latest version of this programming package.
Office 2004, Part 2, Excel and Entourage (11-05-04) Dr. Neale Monks. In the second part of his review of Office 2004, Neale Monks looks at Excel and Entourage.
Phone Valet 2.0 (11-05-04) Pat St-Arnaud. The best question to ask might be "Is there anything that you can't do with this telephone/Mac integration tool?"
TiPaint Touch-up Kit and iKlear iPod Cleaning Kit (10-29-04) Dr. Neale Monks. Is it possible to restore the shiny good looks of iPods and PowerBooks even after years of use? Neale Monks looks at two cleaning products designed especially for Apple hardware.
Microsoft Office 2004, Part 1, PowerPoint (10-15-04) Dr. Neale Monks. In the first part of his review of Office 2004, Neale Monks looks at PowerPoint, for many people still the benchmark for presentation software.
ScrapX (9-17-04) Dr. Neale Monks. Aqueous Software's ScrapX brings the Scrapbook to OS X
CDFinder (8-20-04) Dr. Neale Monks. Finding what you want from among a stack of similar looking CDs can be a hassle, but help is at hand. Neale Monks looks at CDFinder, a budget-priced but powerful cataloguing tool.
Endnote 7 (8-13-04) Dr. Markus Geisen. EndNote 7 is a literature database that seamlessly interacts with your word processor. Is the latest version worth the upgrade?