I'll have plenty to show at MAX myself this year (Dreamweaver being a large part of that), and although the final session and track schedules haven't been announced yet, what I've seen of the content so far is absolutely mind-blowing. Hope to see you there!
]]>Design is not static these days, but stateful, and dynamic. Forms proactively validate themselves in modern designs, and user interfaces intertwine dynamically-loaded data with application-like interaction models. Being born in a static age, Dreamweaver needed to come to parity with the way these types of immersive site experiences are designed and developed by today's web pro. We met with a lot of designers and developers across the map after Dreamweaver CS3 was in the can, watched how they worked and tried to reflect the best of what we learned in Dreamweaver's tools and workflow. The result is Stiletto.
Stiletto's Live View lets you render the current page in Webkit - with JavaScript-driven interface elements and dynamic data from local servers in place - then freeze a particular page state and use the new Code Navigator and Related Files toolbar to directly navigate the asset files that combine to render a given element on the page. Quite frankly, there's nothing quite like it in other design and development tools. Subversion support in the Files panel and extended, dynamic JavaScript code hinting help you be more effective with your site assets. Stiletto's user interface has undergone work as well, now far less obtrusive, with auto-hiding and minimizing panels, a muted color scheme and horizontal/vertical split view options to maximize whatever display real-estate you've got at hand.
I've been using Stiletto pretty constantly for the last few months, and now refuse to go back to Dreamweaver CS3, quite honestly. And we hope you enjoy using Stiletto as much as we've enjoyed researching and building it. Let us know what you think in the beta forum- the features are pretty much locked but bugs and feature requests are always welcomed. We have a few video walkthroughs of the new features at Adobe TV as well, and you can read more about the DW public beta (and get the download) here at Adobe Labs.
I'll be posting thoughts, tips, suggestions and new tidbits of information about Stiletto from time to time, so if you're new here, save a bookmark (or add my feed to your daily scoop) and check back once in a while.
Enjoy!
]]>Currently I'm in Dave McFarland's "JavaScript for Designers" session, which is starting off quite nicely (great slides, too), but will probably be lurking in the lounge area between sessions catching up on email and feeds. Tap me on the shoulder if you're here and say hey!
]]>Very cool extension!
Now Menu Writer is obviously a commercial extension, but WebAssist has a special deal going thru May 27th (normally $99, but $74.99 for the first few weeks), so get it while it's hot. :)
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. ;-)
]]>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:
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?
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.
]]>Thanks for the opportunity, Steve!
Update: Sorry for the broken link, folks- fixed now. Thanks for the heads-up!]]>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.
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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.
]]>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.
]]>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!
]]>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.
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