May 07, 2008
Back Online
MXNA wasn't the only thing down in recent weeks, many Adobe staffers with blogs on the venerable old weblogs.macromedia.com server also had their blogs and archives inaccessible during the same stretch (and for the same reasons), myself included. Good news- my blog is back online again and should be for the near future. I'm still weighing my long-term options for migrating off the old Macromedia weblog server, but it's nice to at least have the old, familiar site up and running again here in the interim. Old permalinks here could break for a few more hours, but that should be fixed in short order as well.
Fortunately this is resolved, as I'm going to have a LOT to talk about in just a few short weeks- which I strongly suspect will be of interest to you as well. ;-)
Posted by sfegette at 01:33 PM | Comments (5)
April 28, 2008
Farewell, GoLive
Although it's long been rumored, today the news was officially delivered- GoLive will no longer be sold as of today (April 28th, 2008), and the focus will shift to Dreamweaver long-term for Adobe's professional web design & development customers. This is news that I'm reasonably certain most GoLive users saw coming as far back as the CS3 launch- when Dreamweaver replaced GoLive in the Creative Suite packages - but it's good to finally have an official word on the matter. GoLive (versions 5, 6, CS2 and 9) customers can take advantage of a $199 cross-grade special (same price as a Dreamweaver upgrade, basically) to pick up Dreamweaver CS3, which means there'll be a lot of GoLive customers considering Dreamweaver now.
There's been a lot of speculation on if and when this would happen - and if so, why - so I wanted to at least give a little perspective on this from my vantage point - as a long-time Dreamweaver team member - on two of the main concerns I've heard around Dreamweaver taking the helm of our web design products.
Lack of Competition
Ever since the Macromedia acquisition, I've heard the pretty regular concern that Adobe's competitors were systematically being eliminated, leaving the competitive landscape around our products bleak and quite frankly - non-competitive. Honestly, I couldn't see that more differently - competitors are all around if you care to look for them- from lightweight web design/development apps like Coda, CSSEdit and others, to full-blown IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. For design-centric web developers, apps like Freeway and the reasonably-newer Expression Web are viable options. GoLive was a worthy competitor, but lately we've even more competing tools to consider as we build out Dreamweaver's roadmap, not less. That can only be a good thing for the competitive web design landscape - and Dreamweaver's future within it - in my opinion.
Coders vs Designers
Web design has increasingly become a more technical discipline over the years, and Dreamweaver's secret to success was always to follow what the pro web designers were doing on a project and workflow basis, and enable that within our tools. We occasionally hear criticism that Dreamweaver isn't 'WYSIWYG enough', or needs to support more drag-and-drop features and get away from the code. But that's not what the pro web design market has been telling us - web design is not like print design, or even Flash design. When was the last time you needed to hack your InDesign files to print correctly on that one, finicky printer? Web browsers are OUR printers, and they sure as heck don't always play as nicely with one another- let alone render the same way even on the best of days. Visual tools can get you 90% of the way there with the current browser landscape- but that remaining 10% of your headache is almost always code-based- a browser hack inserted into the stylesheet or perhaps some judicious markup-juggling to get that layout working correctly. And when this bites you, you absolutely, positively, have to have access to your code. Plain and simple. Sure, a lot of print designers have become accustomed to GoLive's more visual model, but at the end of the day Dreamweaver has to serve it's primary market - professional web designers and developers - and the market spoke quite loudly on that subject years ago. We're just following their lead, honestly.
But I'm sure there's lots of good ideas to consider now too, do you have favorite GoLive features that you'd like the DW team to consider going forward? If so, please use our bug/wish list form here to send them in for consideration (always the most direct path to getting a request into the teams here, FYI):
So What's Next?
This will undoubtedly be a period of transition as there's a lot of GoLive users who are now considering Dreamweaver, and we'd like to make sure that your transition's a smooth one. I strongly recommend checking out the resources we've made available at the following URL:
http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/switch
These include:
- The GoLive to Dreamweaver migration extension - helping you convert the structure of your legacy sites to a format that can be imported and managed by Dreamweaver.
- GoLive to Dreamweaver Site Migration guide - written by GoLive experts Adam Pratt and Lynn Grillo.
- Training Video from Lynda.com - giving tips and tricks for getting up to speed quickly with Dreamweaver, including the migration process
Indeed, there's a lot of areas of difference between GoLive and Dreamweaver, but hopefully these bits of info will help you make the most sense of them quickly.
For the Dreamweaver team, we've already seen many of the GoLive engineers join our ranks, who are all contributing quite a bit to the next release of Dreamweaver already. It's been a pretty smooth transition internally, and is resulting in one amazing team. However, I realize that this news may be much more upsetting to you, but sincerely hope that the the transition is as painless as possible. Let us know how we can help?
Posted by sfegette at 05:10 PM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2008
Random News Items
I've been pretty hectic between travel and SxSW the last couple weeks, but a few cool items of note may have slipped past. Catching up now...
- Kuler just got an update today, with a feature I've been drooling over since I heard about it a few weeks back- color extraction! You can now upload an image, and have Kuler extract the dominant color theme from it. Simply awesome feature- saves me from my old "Posterize > sample colors to a swatch" workflow in Photoshop. Make sure and give the Kuler team your feedback, too.
- The Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced at SxSW last week that the Dreamweaver Task Force is being renamed and expanded to the Adobe Task Force, covering a wider range of our products. Don't fear, though- our historical cooperation with WaSP from the Dreamweaver team is alive and kicking as always, and will continue into the foreseeable future. I love those guys for keeping us honest over the years!
- Chris Charlton has been working overtime again and sneaked a peek at his upcoming DW extension for Drupal developers - the Dreamweaver Themer's Kit extension for Drupal. I swear that guy never sleeps, if you've been following his developer site xtnd.us you know exactly what I'm talking about. You can also check the Adobe Technologies group he manages out over at groups.drupal.org. Get some rest, Chris- we need you for the 4th quarter, man!
Anyway, since I didn't feel like posting yet another dissection of what went wrong in Sarah Lacy's interview of Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg last week (although I missed the beginning of the interview, I was drawn to the trainwreck ending like a moth to a flame), or general 'wish you were here' posts from SXSW, so I hope these tidbits are a little lighter on the fluff. If you want the blow-by-blow from last week in Austin, you can rewind my Twitter stream, after all.
Posted by sfegette at 04:35 PM | Comments (5)
March 04, 2008
Pros and Cons of Unobtrusive JavaScript?
Web developer Steve Stringer contacted me last week, and was interested in a point-counterpoint discussion on the merits of unobtrusive JavaScript (or lack thereof), and both myself and author Dave McFarland (Dreamweaver MX - The Missing Manual) took him up on it. You can read the results at Steve's StringFoo blog here - and by all means please jump into the comments if you have strong opinions one way or the other. (I'll refrain from further commentary here, as I pretty much summed my opinions up in the article, and would prefer to channel followup conversation to the article itself, too.)
Thanks for the opportunity, Steve!
Update: Sorry for the broken link, folks- fixed now. Thanks for the heads-up!Posted by sfegette at 11:56 AM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2008
2 Bits of Browser News
First - and probably most surprising - the Internet Explorer 8 team just announced the reversal of the year. Instead of IE8 rendering in IE7 compatibility mode by default (and requiring a meta tag/header to 'turn on' IE8 compliance), the IE team just announced that IE8 will interpret web content in the most forward-looking, standards-compliant way that it can. The community has been very vocal about this, so it's great to see the IE team not just listen, but respond directly to the negative feedback. To be clear, there was definitely a split in the standards community on the subject, but at the end of the day I can't help but feel that having IE render more closely to standards by default is the right thing to do.
Secondly, the Web Standards Project (aka WaSP) just announced that the Acid3 browser test is now available, providing yet another benchmark for compliance for the browser vendors as a whole to refer to. IE8, for the record, recently passed the Acid2 test, but Drew hints that 'work is already underway based on the Acid3 previews', which is heartening to hear as well. Let's hope all the browser vendors take Acid3 to heart, as a world with far less cross-browser rendering headaches is a world I'd really like to live in.
Posted by sfegette at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2008
Fox Sports Adds Spry Photo Galleries
Very cool- just got word that Fox Sports has implemented a very nice set of Spry-based photo galleries like this one:
You can check out the new FoxSports.com Photo Galleries here:
http://msn.foxsports.com/pgStory?workingCategoryId=0
Make sure to click around with the sliding panels to check out the variety of galleries they've already implemented- really makes for a great vewing experience, and an equally great example of Spry in action. Nice job.
Posted by sfegette at 01:40 PM | Comments (1)
February 10, 2008
Spry - Linking to a Non-Default Panel
So you like those fancy-schmancy Spry accordions, but have the need to deep-link into closed accordion panels from an external page? That's a pretty obvious use case usability-minded designers (and their clients) may require, and Dreamweaver and PHP guru David Powers has a great tutorial on just that topic on his Foundation Dreamweaver blog - "Linking to a non-default panel".
If you're strictly using the visual Spry tools in Dreamweaver to author, you're probably missing a lot of the hidden gems in SpryURLUtils.js (included with the Spry 1.6 update), and this is a great tutorial for taking that first dive into the extra goodies v1.6 provides.
Posted by sfegette at 05:19 PM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2008
WaSP Bike-Hugger BBQ at SXSW 08
Headed to SXSW '08 this year? I know I am, and I generally try to hit any/all WaSP-related events open to the public as I'm a bit obsessed with standards, personally speaking. Fortunately this year there's more than just the annual meeting, the Web Standards Project are also hosting a barbecue event right across from the main event hall.
Because there's so much going on in the world wide web today (IE8, HTML5), this year we're doing an additional event: the Bike Hugger Beer & BBQ. It's open to all SXSW interactive attendees, with free beer, free food and free (?) WaSP members present to discuss the state of the browser landscape.
This will be similar to the WaSP Cafés which, by the by, have been held in Tokyo, France and Spain over the last year, with 2008's first WaSP Café (held in Paris) having a grand total of 70 people attending!
The core topic for the WaSP discussion will be the IE8 versioning proposal, which clearly has been a hot topic since the very moment it was announced on A List Apart. All the WaSPs that will be at SXSW will be present, so we hope to see you there as well!
More details on the event can be found on the WaSP site, of course.
Only downer for me is that I won't be flying in until Saturday afternoon due to another speaking gig back in the Bay Area, but I'll be trying to go straight here from the airport. Hope to see you there!
Posted by sfegette at 11:59 AM | Comments (3)
January 30, 2008
Ajax Framework Love for Dreamweaver
If you've been using Dreamweaver for Ajax work recently, you may have been underwhelmed with DW's current code-level support for common JS frameworks and libs. Should that be the case, you'll want to be praising LA developer (and old-skool Dreamweaver kung-fu master) Chris Charlton postehaste for releasing two DW extensions to enable support for Prototype.js and JQuery into Dreamweaver (MX through CS3).
You can get hold of the beta releases and view example screencasts at Chris' site - xtnd.us - and make sure to send him some love for really kicking tail on these extensions. If you're interested in MooTools and/or YUI support, he's taking requests - and it also appears that a Mochikit extension is in the works as we speak.
Although Chris has noted an ExtJS extension is current on hold at the xtnd.us site linked above, it may be (as noted in the comment threads here at Ajaxian) due to the fact that a Windows ExtJS extension for Dreamweaver MX 2004 was built out by the Spket folks, which they're planning to port up to CS3 soon.
Chris: here's a virtual high-five from the DW team for your innate coolness in jumping on this project so quickly for DW developers worldwide. We've got some plans in the works in these regards ourselves, but this is a solution that the DW/Ajax development community can use right now, today. Hot damn. You rock, my man.
Posted by sfegette at 03:25 PM | Comments (2)
January 10, 2008
WebAssist Dreamweaver Tools for kuler
A cool new free extension for Dreamweaver was released by WebAssist today- the Dreamweaver Tools for kuler (kuler being, of course, Adobe's web application/service for exploring and creating color themes at kuler.adobe.com). Search for specific themes, colors, or just explore the most recent, most popular and highest ranked color themes directly from Dreamweaver- then sample them directly into your active page/site/application project. Nice!
And in case I wasn't direct enough... this extension is a free download, no less. Go get it!
Posted by sfegette at 01:21 PM | Comments (0)