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September 21, 2005
Dreamweaver 8's Autocomplete
... is just awesome. Closest thing I've seen yet to a truly killer new feature. No longer does it dump the ending tag into the document as soon as you create the starting tag. Rather, when you type </ to close a tag, it looks for the most deeply nested tag that's still opened and writes in the closing tag for it. In my experience, it's been right on the money every time. It's smart enough to look upwards in the nesting tree if everything else is already closed.
Also, it makes singleton tags like <BR> and <HR> XHTML compliant automatically. Very slick.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 3:50 PM | Comments (0)
September 19, 2005
First Impressions of Flash 8
I installed the trial version of Flash 8 and am, so far, quite impressed. The application definitely seems more capable than its creaky predecessor, although I've yet to do a project of any significance in it. I opened a few old projects and exported them and everything seems tighter.
New stuff:
- Supposedly bitmaps work much better within Flash than they used to (which is a little like saying FEMA this week is improved over two weeks ago -- the baseline is not high). It looks like there's still some nasty dot crawl on scaled JPEGs, but time will tell how much better it works. I'm not convinced yet.
- Security warnings seem much more effectively voiced. Macromedia's done a good job at making sure that Flash movies can't do anything nefarious to your system, but haven't always been very good about telling developers how to let Flash do things you would like it to do on a local system. Looks like they done some work so that when things fail, the system lets you know.
- Scalable live effects (drop shadows, blur and whatnot) work pretty well, even on bitmaps. Will be interesting to see what performance hit one sees. Moving and scaling bitmaps in Flash is usually a pretty expensive process, often pegging the processor even on small bitmaps. If you try to move more than three simultaneously, the universe reapproaches singularity.
Despite the clamor of many developers last year at Max, the beginner mode for the ActionScript editor window remains long gone. (Thanks, Chris) -- beginner mode is back, but has been moved to the "Script Assist" button in the Action window. Many will be pleased by this.- Flash now integrates with Dreamweaver 8's "sites," letting you manage them from within Flash. Not sure how useful that is, but it's there.
- New video encoding stuff. Yay! Looking forward to seeing the quality vs. the old version. There's also a QuickTime plug-in. Creating Flash video in the old days was a real PitA.
I do wish it would allow you to specify MX 2004 as the default filetype for saving. As it is now, you have to do a Save As... if you want to attain backwards file compatibility, which is stupid. If Photoshop can have a compatibility setting, so can Flash. Saving anything in the native format is an unnecessary lock-in.
More to come..
Posted by Lee Clontz at 3:50 PM | Comments (0)
Installed Dreamweaver 8
After a rather troubled experience with the Studio MX 2004 apps, Macromedia's out with the new versions of... pretty much everything. (Speaking of, does anyone else find it odd that they're able to miraculously finish the new versions of all of their software at exactly the same time? I wish they'd just release it when it's done, rather than try to attach them all to the same date.)
The MX 2004 suite had some real quality control problems which continue to this day. Flash Pro only became a usable product with 7.2. Everything prior crashed constantly under any significant load or wouldn't launch at all. Dreamweaver was similarly, if not as drastially, affected by excessive memory use. I place the blame on the ominous "Macromedia Licensing.exe" service that ran all the time, but that may not be fair.
At any rate, I'm installing the new apps now. Some initial impressions:
Dreamweaver:
- Dreamweaver seems to run a little faster (thank god), although the first time I ran it, it never finished launching. Not good. Takes about 10-12 seconds to fully bootstrap on a machine running a lot of processes. Not ideal, but probably a little better than MX 2004. Still not as fast as something like Word. We'll see how the speed in the rest of the program is.
- They've added, in Dreamweaver, a "Dual Monitor" selection for panel display. Nice idea, although I wish it was smarter. If I'm set up for "coder" view, I don't need the Code Inspector taking up most of the window. Minor gripe, but hey.
- They've fixed the problem where WebDAV passwords had to be saved in the site manager. You can now leave your Dreamweaver password blank and you'll be prompted for it. Praise be!
- File transfer dialogs are no longer modal. In other words, you can still work while the program is transferring files. That's nice.
- WebDAV transfers seem a little faster. Anecdotal, but it's something.
- One annoying bug: the "connect/disconnect plug" button in the Files menu never lights up. You seem to have to hit the 'Refresh' button to connect to your remote site. The tooltip updates to say whether you're connected or not, but the button never becomes active. Strange. If it's by design, I can't understand why.
- The "Manage Sites" interface is brain-dead. There's no way to disable site definitions you only use occasionally, or to nest them, or to sort them (say, by last-updated) or to reorder them or to do much of anything with them. This interface has been the same for the past god-knows-how-many versions of Dreamweaver and they never seem to update it.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 12:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 9, 2005
Riley's First Movie
Ry had a forced sick day yesterday because his day care requires him to be out for 24 hours after he's had a fever. He came home Wednesday with a little fever bug, but he was fine on Thursday, so we were stuck looking for something to do. I thought he might want to go to the Fernbank Museum of Natural History to see the dinosaur fossils, and decided to try him out in the IMAX theater. There was a showing of "The Living Sea" at 11 a.m., so we got a ticket to his first movie.
We had a really good time and he seemed to like most of the movie (up until the end where there were more people onscreen). He dug the fish, the boats and the airplanes big time.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 8:41 PM | Comments (0)
September 7, 2005
Starting Class Today
JRNL311 starts today, and we'll be posting all of our work and information to our blog at j311.com. Might be crossposting some stuff here as appropriate.
Posted by Lee Clontz at 4:28 PM