Adobe Dreamweaver CC Reviews21.1

There are, indeed, a variety of alternatives to Dreamweaver - ranging from 100% visual to code-only tools: VISUAL - Responsive Site Designer - Freeway Pro - Blocs App - Sparkle COMBO VISUAL+CODE - Flux - Pinegrow GUIDED CODING - Coda - BBEdit Not included here are the many online-only tools, which allow you to design web pages on your browser. There really is no reason to support a software subscription model.

Frankly, there really is no reason for a Mac user to bother with this app. So many better and cheaper alternatives available. From Coda to Espresso to BBEdit to Sublime Text, Mac users have plenty of options to choose from.

Let's see, we've had The New Coke. We've had J. C. Penney with its no-sales policy. Now we have Adobe's CC. If I'm not mistaken, the first two of these three flopped so badly that a change in CEO's was in order. Let's see if Adobe can pull off the hat trick.

golive killed. bugs never fixed. support below zero. updates always far to expensive. and now forced updates. I feel like a factory farming animal. like a cow to be milked for what it's worth. I had enough. bye bye greedobe!

MacUpdate head's up: As of 12-05-2012 it's up to 12.0.2

I have to disagree with you folks. I operate a Web site which is very heavily text-oriented, and most of the time I use Dreamweaver as a kind of specialized word processor (I wouldn't have to do this if there were any actual word-processor which exported halfway decent text in html format, but I've tried them all and I can guarantee you that there isn't). My philosophy is to go in and write, or at least manipulate, actual code as little as possible. As I say, I use Dreamweaver, because it's the only Apple program on the market since the demise of such rivals as Claris Home Page. Well, okay, Dreamweaver is semi-lousy. It' got bugs that Adobe must know all about but has never bothered to fix, it's clumsy and over-complex, and its cost is outrageous. I'd replace it in a heartbeat if I had an alternative, but since there isn't it will remain the basic tool of my trade. And here's my point: I wouldn't bother you folks talking about myself if I imagined I were the only person in the world with needs like mine. But I bet there are plenty of us. I very much resent you guys trying to write the obituary of the WYSIWYG page creation program. As far as I'm concerned, it's as necessary a tool as it ever was.

With apps like Espresso and Coda available, there is hardly any reason to use this bloated and overpriced app. It is sluggish, it's FTP functionality is average at best, the text editor is poor when compared to others (i.e. horrible snippets functionality), it's "live preview" is tedious to use and the app is also rather cumbersome to use with a dual screen setup, which can be done wonderfully with, say, Espresso or even CSSEdit or Textmate. With the $400 that DW costs, you can buy yourself Expresso 2, Transmit 4, MAMP Pro, VMWare Fusion and a Home Edition of Windows 7 (to test your sites in IE) and you would still have some money to buy a couple of books on HTML/CSS/JS. That's far more value than DW will ever give.

Once again, Adobe shows how they continue to drop the ball when it comes to their updaters. I updated to DW 11.0.4 (build 4493) yesterday via the Adobe Updater application. Today, the Adobe Updater application tells me there is another update for Dreamweaver, version 11.0.3! Yes, it's telling me the previous version is available to me for updating. And of course, when you try to run it, it fails. Adobe's CS updaters have been junk from day one and they still can't get it right.

Designed for the late 90's and never has changed. I can think of so many better workflows than using this. $400 :)

For developing in Wordpress I switched to Coda, CSSEdit and Firebug. I was excited to learn about DW's ability to integrate with CMS systems I was curious as to whether I could switch back. No way. Feels like a giant step backwards. Clumsy. Confusing. Everything I want to do seems so much farther away. This is probably the last shot I give this program.

It would be silly to write a full review of a program as complex as Dreamweaver after only one day's use, but here are some first impressions. First, the best feature of Dreamweaver, that comes close to making up for its many many shortcomings is that it writes nicely clean code. Let's never forget this. Having said that, my first impressions of the CS5 version are largely negative. 1.) The installation process is very unpleasant. To be sure, the annoying activation process is now automated (but since the Deactivate command has been removed from its former menu, how do you deactivate it to switch to another computer). But the installer does not automatically transfer Preference settings and user-created Commands from an earlier version, you have to spend a frustrating amount of time setting it up manually. That's how I spent a good deal of my afternoon today. 2.) The interface cries out for improvement. Why, for example, can't the user assign keyboard equivalents to self-created Commands? And, although Dreamweaver has been Unicode-friendly since CS3, can't it do somethingas simple as automatically inserting curly quotes and em-dashes. So far, I haven't come across any interface improvements whatsoever. 3.) At least one of the bugs that has been in Dreamweaver since CS3, if not even earlier, the one where your type font will inexplicably be replaced on the screen by another one, is still alive and well. I'm waiting to see others resurface (for example the one where highlighting text doesn't make any visible difference in the way the screen draws the text in question). As you may guess from my remarks, my site is very text-oriented so these are the kinds of things I notice. If you use Dreamweaver for other purposes you'll probably have your own list of pet peeves. Now, all the kinds of things I have listed combine to suggest a kind of contempt for the end user on part of the developer. That's way too easy an attitude to develop when you have no serious competition. It's good that Adobe doesn't have a similar monopoly over making cars, or our highways would be littered with corpses. That why, like many others who have written reviews in this series, I'd drop Dreamweaver like a live grenade if a good rival product ever comes on the market. There's another consideration, too. Steve Jobs may rail against Flash all he wants, but as long as Adobe enjoys its monopoly on page-design software it's going to run the table when it comes to dictating web standards. It can use its software to push Flash all it wants, and it can drag its heels forever in putting out software that can handle HTML-5. I. m. h. o, Apple, Microsoft, and any other corporation which wants to see Flash discarded as a web standard needs to put out page design software that breaks this monopoly. That might have the effect of making Adobe wake up and start putting out much better products than this one.

Adobe has never been a Mac friendly company. They remain belligerently loyal to the Windows of the world. They're continually making the statement "Yes, we can make money off Mac users, but certainly not at our taint." As powerful as Photoshop Elements is, can you get any further from the Mac interface in the Mac version of Elements 6? Dark charcoal grey menus are awful to interact with as a GUI in a graphics app, but it does say "We don't need no stinkin' Macs". So why do I patronize Adobe? I'm bonded to Dreamweaver since the days of "Studio 3" and Macromedia (which didn't understand Apple much better than Adobe), and I'm too old for a new learning curve and site migration tom-foolery. Fortunately for me, Adobe hasn't vested the time/energy into dramatically changing Dreamweaver interface ("we are not worthy") so that I, intellectually vested in the 1980's interface, am still comfortable with Dreamweaver of 2009, CS4 from my "Dreamweaver 3" days. Comfortable with it's awkwardness, which is a very weird staement, and certainly counterproductive to creativity. Adobe knows it has acquired some powerful, necessary applications. Their resistance to the Mac platform's GUI is almost comical in it's PC fundamentalism. It is certainly a left-handed compliment of the Mac's encroachment into The World. Yes, Adobe "support" helped me with the upgrade issues I had with my purchase of CS4. The only reason I did the upgrade was because Snow Leopard made DW MX 2004 unusable. I was forced to upgrade. Of course I was sent the wrong upgrade product and the wrong serial number. Of course my first attempt at online correction wouldn't let me upgrade from DW MX 2004. After numerous emails, the second attempt at correction also failed. I eventually succeeded with a 30 minute phone call. It took a total of 6 weeks for me to be able to edit/access my sites. Since I had done this after my migration to Mac OSX 10.6, I did not have the easy file migration option. I had not done an "export" option in the "Mange Sites" menu. I didn't know it would be important when I upgraded to Mac OSX 10.6. So now I finally had a valid copy of DW, but I couldn't access my sites. Now what? Reinstall Mac OS X 10.5 so I can access my older DW files and "Save as..."? It took a lot of online searching to finally be directed to which 16kb file held the "keys to the kingdom". When I finally did this, I was good to go. But 6 weeks, many hours, and a huge PITA! When EVER have you done ANY Mac app upgrade that was not intuitive, that didn't handle all of the file conversions invisibly and properly. And succeeded? They all do. Except Adobe. Yes, they have powerful and useful apps. If ANYTHING comes along that does all the same stuff in a "Mac way" (you all know what I mean: clear/clean/concise), I'll quickly jump ship. I really don't understand Adobe's refusal to become "Mac-friendly". We're out there, waiting. For Adobe or any respectable Plan B. At this point, I'm rooting for "Plan B"

Without a doubt, Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is the worst upgrade I have ever seen from a major software publisher. Make that any publisher. I have been using CS3 since it was released to fairly good measure. CS4 is so slow that it is completely unusable on my machine (iMac 2.4 GHz dual running OSX 10.5.6). In split view, it takes 10-15 seconds for selected text to highlight. I am running no extensions, and my local site is on my local computer. I have searched all over the Web for a solution, and found much discussion of this problem in Dreamweaver and other CS4 applications. There is hardly a mention anywhere in Adobe's support site. The program runs like a non-optimized beta. I'm thinking it could be caused by Flex or weird Java. Does anyone have any suggestions at all? I've now reinstalled CS3 on the same computer, and it runs fine.