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September 19, 2005
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 September 19, 2005 12:17 PM
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