Dreamweaver CS4 Beta - Initial thoughts
So, Adobe have made a public beta of DW CS4 & Fireworks available to anyone who has an existing serial number. Of course, I was in there like a shot, never having been one to hold back on trying new stuff. Point in case: I tried Hake the other day. They (apparently) eat a lot of hake (merluza) in Spain, and I’m learning Spanish, so I felt like I should make the effort, but Hake is now definitely not on my (admittedly steadily increasing) list of Fish I Can Eat Without Feeling Sick.
Now I haven’t felt ill once while using DWCS4, although I was a little disconcerted by a few definitely beta-like oddities, which I put down to non-optimisation of code. Things like not being able to switch between code and design view on occasion, or the nifty little HTML/CSS button on the properties panel not having any effect. But hey, intermittent and frankly minor issues.
Spry
My main area of interest these days, that keeps me fiddling with the computer way after I should have stopped, is Spry. Adobe have done some very clever stuff with Spry, and the implementation in DW has improved a lot. In particular, I want to mention working with Spry Datasets. You can now create pretty complex master/detail relationships with XML or HTML data very easily indeed. It writes all the JS and CSS for you, while making all of this stuff transparent enough for anyone with intermediate CSS skills to completly customise the appearance. I was very pleased to find that I could drop an HTML table into a document, point Spry at it for it’s data source, and have it construct a nice little menu system with no additional coding on my part. HTML data sources are a relatively recent addition to the Spry framework, allowing you to work with either external or internal data tables. This cuts out the necessity of working with more complex XML data, and means that existing tables can be repurposed. Having had to do the same thing by hand a few months ago for an educational website, I can safely say that this is quite a time-saver and a welcome addition to Dreamweaver. There’s much more going on Spry-wise, and I plan to talk about it more in the future, but this is one of those features that will get static-page developers moving over to working with data with minimal learning curve climbing.
Related Files
Initially, I thought that this looked confusing. After a few weeks of working with it though, it’s an invaluable feature. The basic idea is that any CSS, JS files etc. are displayed by name at the top of the document window. If you are working in Split view, as I often do, you can flip between, for example, the HTML and the CSS document, and make changes to the CSS while continuing to preview the HTML file. This obviously removes the necessity in previous versions to have both documents physically open if you wanted to hand-edit your CSS files. Same thing works with Javascript files, and here’s another great new feature that works perfectly in conjunction with Related Files:
Live View
Live view does what you might expect: It turns your preview (actually it works for the code as well) into a real preview, so what you get is actually what you see. Everything from Spry to embedded Google Gadgets works just as it would in a browser (of course if it’s not going to work because you’ve made an error and there are bugs in your code, you’ll see that too). Funnily enough, simple links don’t seem to work, but perhaps that’s intentional, I’m not sure.
I’ll be having more thoughts on Dreamweaver CS4 soon, I’m sure.
Add comment July 22nd, 2008