The Weather is Changing

The weather is changing, again. I love this time of year. I have lived on both coasts and several places here in the middle and I can tell you this: There is nothing like an eastern Nebraska autumn.

Lumpy people like me can hide some of those lumps under layers of clothes. The air smells fresh and crisp in the morning and we can turn our air conditioners off. The cars still start and there is dew, not frost, on the windows. In another week or two we'll start to notice the colors changing. There are any number of end-of-summer holidays and harvest events and celebrations. It's a good time to be here. The wheel keeps turning, though, and if your favorite season is coming up, it'll be upon us soon enough. But for me, I love the fall.

The technology weather is changing, too. Adobe have announced that they will announce Creative Suite Four on the 23rd of this month. So we have been warned, there, I guess. I have been using the Dreamweaver CS4 beta for a couple of months and it's interesting. This is the first version that Adobe had time to get into, really, and gives a good indication of where they are taking Dreamweaver... or pointing it, anyway.

The biggest improvement that I have noticed is the ability to split-screen Code Views. We have always been able to split our workspace into two units. One was always the Design View and the only other option was Code View. You could drag-and-drop things into Design View and Dreamweaver would work out the HTML for you. You could see comments in Code View, as well as all of the various tags affecting your markup. Cool.

What's new this turn is that you can have two panes of Code View. In one, you can be displaying lines 23-75, say, of your page. And in the other you can be showing lines 320-365. So if you're repeating something you did earlier in the page you can actually see the markup you're trying to replicate while you're working on the page. You can work equally well in either pane—making edits in the top pane changes the document you scroll up in the bottom panel, and vice-versa. It's a little thing, but it's a nice feature for those of us who are spending more and more time in Code View. There are other changes, though I'm not sure everyone will see them as improvements.

Adobe seems to have spent a lot of money trying to make Dreamweaver a tool more of the hard-core developers would be interested in, again. There are workspace options and panels we've not seen before. There were four workspaces, plus one you could save on your own. Now there are eight: App Developer, App Developer Plus, Classic, Coder, Coder Plus, Designer, Designer Compact and one called Dual Screen. The insert ribbon is now a panel. The Properties panel and Search panels, apparently, are always visible now. You used to be able to drag those off or hide them. Command-[F3] hides Properties as it always has, but the top of the chrome is still there. And we've done away with the manilla-folder tabs. Now you select button/boxes. The effect is the same, but they are no longer "tabs". This is carried through to opened documents, too.

It'll take a little getting used to. But, so does the weather. And the crew that brings us CS4 apparently all still have jobs. So there will one day probably be a Dreamweaver CS5. And the great wheel keeps turning….