It came up last week, during training. “When will the next version of Dreamweaver arrive, and what kinds of differences can we expect?”
It seems like only yesterday since the upgrade from CS3 to CS4, but the big wheel keeps on turning. As I tell people in my Introductory class, “The people who brought you Dreamweaver CS4 still have jobs!” There will be another new version of Dreamweaver one day, probably (but by no means guaranteed to be) named “CS5”. A new version, however it’s named, may be with us as soon as the summer of 2010.
Remember, Dreamweavers so far have been called Dreamweaver, -2, -3, -4, -5 and then Dreamweaver MX2000 and Dreamweaver MX2004, then Dreamweaver 8, -CS3 and -CS4. So, really, it’s anyone’s guess.
What kinds of changes can we expect? The developers at Macromedia and Adobe both spent some major coin pumping up the support of Web standards and Cascading Stylesheets, since the MX releases. Every version has been better than the previous one, in that regard. It is now easier to twiddle with CSS, and the twiddling results in much better markup.
The user interface has been cleaned-up a bunch. Remember we lost a whole menu in the move from CS3 to CS4 (“Text”). I would expect a few improvements here, again. I would expect a little more modernization. Dreamweaver CS4 no longer includes the Netscape Navigator “Resize Fix” JavaScript code. I expect one day soon some cub developer will be tasked with shining-up the Snippets section, improving the default dates in the drop-down menu options and maybe adding a few new ones--it’s been a good long while we saw anything happening, here.
The Mobile Web is not getting any smaller, and I would not be surprised to see more support for that in the next version. Maybe a simpler, easier way to approximate your latest page in two or three handheld devices.
Dreamweaver’s Design View now runs on the same WebKit engine behind popular browsers like Firefox and Chrome. It would be nice if we could get some kind of a real-world way to view our pages, independent of platform. Suppose I work on a Macintosh. Why should I have to boot up even a virtual Windows machine to check a Web page? Why couldn’t Dreamweaver provide me with some kind of Windows Internet Explorer emulation as part of the program?
One feature I have always disliked, that is probably unlikely to change, is the way you cannot move your cursor up a line in the column one of Text View. Click on a line of text in your markup and right-arrow to the end of the line. One more right-arrow gets you to the very beginning of the next line. Now, up-arrow to get back into the line you just left, and Dreamweaver thoughtfully moves you over about five or six characters into the line. Left-arrow as many times as you need to get back to that first column and up-arrow again and you will once again be in column four or five or six. Whatever it is, it’s annoying to me.
One area where Macromedia and Adobe have always fallen short is in the support and training and even the marketing of features and benefits in the Creative Suite. Can you tell me what “Spry” is and does and how it works and why we should care? Sprinkled throughout the Dreamweaver interface are little references to Spry, but you have to really want to learn what it is and does to get any value or benefit out of it.
What would you like to see, in the next version of Dreamweaver?
I'm on vacation, next week. Keep the lid on it!
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14 comments:
Firefox does not use Webkit. It uses the Gecko rendering engine.
Dreamweaver can't exactly duplicate how different browsers will render the HTML without having the different rending engines from each browser. Microsoft is not likely to hand that code from IE over to anyone.
Good point, Randy, about WebKit and Gecko. But Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the "Design View" browser in other editors. It seems like a previous version of Dreamweaver used it, if I'm remembering correctly (and I messed up on Gecko/WebKit, so who knows?). It may have been Allaire's HomeSite, too, which used to ship with Dreamweaver.
Just a comment on this:
"But Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the Design View browser in other editors."
It is very easy for any Windows application to use the IE web control. However, Adobe's CS suite runs on Mac and PC. The Mac version would not be able to display a compiled component of Windows. To avoid having a different feature set between Mac and PC versions you won't see this.
Bottom line - use Coda from Panic.com on a Mac :)
What I would really like to see is things like
1) Better and more Formatting settings, esp. for Javascript and PHP (but also for CSS).
3) Support for htaccess files
4) More support for accessibility (both during coding and testing) including WCAG and ARIA.
5) Linking opening tag and closing tag in HTML editor, so changing/deleting one automatically changes the other.
6) Global refactoring. Obviously for JS/PHP identifiers, but also for ids, classes etc.
7) Code intelligence for colors/font-stacks in CSS files. So that when I used a color once, it shows up in the code-assist.
So, I am not asking for BIG things, but a lot of small things that would making working with dreamweaver a real dream. Afaic they can drop WYSIWYG and live preview.
Oh well, one can hope.
I'd like to see the subversion version updated. And DW cs5 should allow multiple FTP connections.
The current state of FTP and SVN in dreamweaver makes it hard to work with and integrate Dreamweaver well in a development process.
@Yuvalik: WYSIWYG editing features such as Live Preview are the main reasons I use Dreamweaver. As a pure text editor, it sucks, but as a Visual Editor it is awesome, and there is not other editor around that compares to it in that regard.
If they were to drop that, then I would be better of using Netbeans for my web design (crap when it comes to HTML handling).
Agreed- ftp needs to be updated. It is the most frustrating portion of dreamweaver. Than and the bugs dreamweaver crops up and the un easy way of adding files to the search and code highlighting lists.
Need an easier way to graphicly lay out divs (and nested divs), set prefs, select divs, and lay in graphics and text (similar to the way they used to do table layouts, but now just apply it to divs).
Need better support for CSS Grid schemes like BluePrint and 960.
Ok - sorry to dig this one out of the grave... I'm a Golive Fan! However, I've never been fully able to get my hands around Dreamweaver because I felt the whole GUI was too complex and cumbersome. I really love the GUI of Golive and hope to see them move back in that direction. Another issue that really bugs me is the way you work with tables in DW. I really preferred the easy way of working with Tables in GL.
What about Adobe Pagemill? Man, i remember those days!
How about a highlight function? Whenever I jump and click through windows, I lose the line I was working on making it a pain to find when working in large chunks of code.
What I want: better SVN support with file conflict handling, file difference handling, CS4 Application Window on Mac, 64-bits application, Cocoa based application on Mac, text-clipping bug in code-view fixed on Mac, site folder selection that always select parent folder bug fixed on Win7, disappearing folders hierarchy in Site Panel on Mac, upgraded Javascript dictionary and code highlighting. I agree it could be great to change the rendering engine. The last versions of GoLive could render Firefox, Opera and probably Webit in version 9. That's all I can think of for now. Adobe should really look at what is Panic is doing with Coda!
Obviously I'm coming late to this little party, and lo, I am using CS5 this very day, but the thing I keep wanting and keeps NOT happening in Dreamweaver is a little more intelligent interaction with the remote server. Specifically, it would be really nice if I could see (and hey, maybe manipulate?) file permissions, and if the Files window distinguished between symbolic links and real files and directories. This seems like an easy enough thing to do, and yet? No. @#$%.
Vicki,
right click the file(s) and or folder(s) and click set permissions towards the bottom. View/Set permissions.
But the symlink files is a different story. I don't deal with them but DAMN THEM.. DAMN THEM TO HELL FOR THAT! :D
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