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Review: Dreamweaver 4 Fireworks 4 StudioReviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Date: April 9, 2002
I'm the kind of guy who can admit when he's wrong. I admitted when I was wrong about Red Dawn (it is a dorky movie), I admitted when I was wrong about switching check out aisles at Lowe's this weekend (we should've stayed put), and I admitted when I was wrong in thinking my one-man, off-off-Broadway interpretation of Logan's Run could ever make me money. I'm now about to admit I've been wrong once more. When it comes to web development tools, you see, I've been all over the board. I started with Adobe's PageMill. Decent enough to learn with, but it didn't take me long to outgrow it. Or, more accurately, to realize I wasn't going to make any money with it. So, it was time to upgrade to GoLive CyberStudio. Dreamweaver was an option back then, but CyberStudio got slightly better reviews and was Mac only. Sometimes, you have to support the home team. Working with CyberStudio, I was able to score a few freelancing projects and eventually land a permanent job with a Cleveland based web design company. Trouble there is that the company was PC only, and was using Microsoft FrontPage. The company bought me the Mac version of FrontPage so I could work from home every now and again, but this proved about as useful as designing websites with toilet paper and crayons while wearing a blindfold and boxing gloves. I remained devoted to CyberStudio, which was by now Adobe GoLive, and soon discovered the glories of BBEdit. If FrontPage on the Mac or PC is good for anything, it's in forcing you to learn HTML/CSS/DHTML coding techniques to get your sites to behave the way you want them to, not how Microsoft wants them too. So, PageMill, CyberStudio, FrontPage, GoLive, and BBEdit. Outdated manuals are stacked on my bookshelf like fuselages in an airplane graveyard (only, as far as I know, no rock videos have ever been filmed on my bookshelf). What's more, I'll soon be needing another bookshelf to house all those software packages rendered useless by Macromedia's Dreamweaver 4 Fireworks 4 Studio. For the longest time, I was told that GoLive and Dreamweaver were both excellent programs that simply worked differently. GoLive was better suited to the PhotoShop/desktop publishing crowd, while Dreamweaver was more for the Freehand/artistic types. I'm a PhotoShop guy, so I've remained faithful to GoLive. Adobe's done a pretty good job with GoLive, and it continues to be a great program. Dreamweaver, however, is just that much better. For me, it bests GoLive not in its power or features, but in the details...the kind of nuances that lead me to believe the developers actually use the program as much as their customers do. In fact, let's start with those. Let's start with the rulers in the document window to help you gage necessary graphic size or to better place CSS elements. Let's start with the ability to select content (be it text, a cell, a table, etc.) by clicking on the tag in a hierarchy at the bottom of the window (anyone who's ever tried to select cells within nested tables in FrontPage will love this feature). Let's start with the ability to sample colors from anywhere on the screen, even outside the program. Not even PhotoShop can do that.
Another big feature for me is Dreamweaver's ability to recognize and display server side include (SSI) files. SSIs are used with code that appears on multiple pages, such as with navigation menus and contact information. This information is stored in a separate file that is then called into the proper pages. The benefit here is that, if this information changes, you need only make the edit once and it appears throughout the site. The drawback is that, until Dreamweaver, web design programs couldn't work with SSIs. Both FrontPage and GoLive recognized the tag that called the SSI, but couldn't display it, making it difficult to get a feel for the page until uploaded. Dreamweaver not only displays the SSI, but even provides one-click access to the file when it needs to be updated. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems to have trouble finding it. When I tried to call the file from within Dreamweaver, it would show me the proper path but tell me the file couldn't be found. However, if I edited the include file with another program, Dreamweaver would recognize and display the changes. Odd. I should point out that all of this achieved without the messy residue of FrontPage extensions or GoLive templates. Defining a website in Dreamweaver doesn't take hard drive and server space with all those ridiculous folders and files, and you don't have to mess around with templates and objects. It simply makes the assigned folder behave like a website. Nothing else to it.
Speaking of multiple users, Dreamweaver 4 has implemented WebDAV, the industry standard protocol that allows for easier project management amongst team members. This brings Dreamweaver a step closer to GoLive's excellent team management features, and jumps a bit ahead by also offering support for Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe. The only drawback with these is that neither SourceSafe nor WebDAV servers currently run in either Mac OSes 9 or X, so they'll do you no good on Macintosh servers. Now, if you're not sure what all of this about, Dreamweaver has you covered there, as well. Along with the manual, Macromedia also provides direct access to information licensed from O'Reilly & Associates. Simply click a button and you're taken to context-sensitive info on whatever you happen to be editing, be it CSS, include files, JavaScript, etc. It's like having someone to automatically turn to the proper page of the manual for you. There's another thing; despite working in GoLive a good many years now, there are still a good many features of which I haven't quite gotten the grasp. The menus feel cumbersome, and finding my way around can sometimes be quite a chore. The Dreamweaver interface is much cleaner, and features are placed--for the most part--in logical areas. Flash users will feel right at home in Dreamweaver, but even those who haven't used other Macromedia products will still quickly learn their way about. If Dreamweaver shipped with a Quick Reference Card, I'd hardly need the manual.
Dreamweaver also does a good job of helping users make the upgrade, offering migration kits for both FrontPage and GoLive. Not only is learning Dreamweaver a simple process, but transferring your old sites can be as well. Dreamweaver does display its share of odd behavior, however. When editing contents in a table, Dreamweaver doesn't always resize the table to fit the contents even if no table or cell height has been set. After a few more edits, the height would finally catch up and shrink to fit. Dreamweaver also has problems with the simple task of selecting text. When I would click and drag to highlight a sentence or paragraph, Dreamweaver would just stop after selecting only a few words. Moving the mouse back and forth would sometimes help the selection past its premature stopping point, but not often enough to be a solution. In the end, I would have to click at the beginning point, then shift click at the ending point to select blocks of text. Cascading Style Sheets tend to be a problem for Dreamweaver, also. Although the editing window does recognize and display CSS determined typefaces, type sizes, type color and such, I couldn't get it to display hover attributes. I found this odd, considering the otherwise excellent implementation of CSS creation and editing. Talk of CSS will now, finally, lead us into Fireworks 4. I almost feel guilty here, because Fireworks deservers a review of its own. Perhaps that'll come, but for now, I'll focus on what I deem to be the best attributes of Fireworks 4.
Rollovers are also fairly simple to create, although not quite as simple as in Adobe ImageReady. The code is clean and integrates nicely with Dreamweaver, of course. Fireworks 4 also has better compatability with Photoshop files; it can open layered images in Photoshop versions up to 6, but text layers will lose their editability. What really amazed me about Fireworks 4, however, is its ability to alter multiple navigation images without having to individually alter each file. Say, for instance, you've created nav buttons with white text on a blue background. Your client now wants a red background. With Fireworks 4, you simply need to open the nav bar (this must be set up to work this way from the onset), change the color in one of the graphics, and re-export the entire nav bar. Even if they're rollovers, you've instantly got your new button graphics and your new code. Setting this up can be tricky at first, but could save countless hours down the road. Some basic Flash capabilities are now built in to Fireworks 4, but this feature frightens me. Fireworks 4 makes it incredibly easy to set up basic Flash buttons and such, which means we'll probably start seeing more of this...all kinds of superfluous and gaudy Flash animations littering websites like McDonald's bags alongside the highway. It's great that Macromedia is making Flash creation so easy, I just hope no one takes advantage of it. Unfortunately, not everything in Fireworks 4 is as easy to control as the Flash features. I found myself going over sections of the manual multiple times before I could correctly take advantage of some of the features, a far cry from Dreamweaver which usually didn't even require the manual. Whether or not this is time well spent depends upon the complexity of your sites and the frequency with which they're updated. And finally, integration between the two packages is just as you'd expect. Dreamweaver 4 and Fireworks 4 work together so well you'd think they were one program. But moreso than that, Dreamweaver plays well with non-Macromedia programs also, namely BBEdit and Photoshop. It shouldn't be difficult to drop Dreamweaver into your current workflow without disruption. Although no visual HTML editor is perfect for all web designers, Macromedia's Dreamweaver 4 currently makes the strongest bid. Its power comes not only from the main features, but from all the smaller interface and usability tricks it incorporates. Fireworks 4, although awkward to use at first, can prove to be a tremendous time-saver if worked properly into the design process. It won't replace Photoshop, but it will pick up where Photoshop fears to tread. After years of working with FrontPage and GoLive, I'm sold on this studio package. Working with any other visual HTML editor just seems a waste of time. In fact, if the company for which I work doesn't make the switch to Dreamweaver soon, I may be making the switch to a new company.
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The list goes on. Small features such as these save you time so often that even the most seemingly arcane details are bound to increase your workflow. Of course, the larger features are bound to help as well. How about the ability to view your document in either code view or design view...or both? Because GoLive doesn't always code the way I want it to, and because FrontPage has a nasty habit of altering my code to suit its needs, I quite often find myself flipping from design to code view to babysit my HTML. Dreamweaver allows this as well, but it can also display both on screen at the same time. If you work in the design window, the code window automatically updates to reflect your changes. Obviously, this feature will prove invaluable to those just learning HTML. If you make changes in the code window, the design window stays put until you tell it to refresh.
This includes an excellent FTP feature that may be the most concise I've seen in a web design program. The FTP information is attached to the project, so the settings need only be entered once to be accessed by anyone who works on the project. This actually makes Dreamweaver's FTP capabilities more useful than most stand-alone FTP programs.
We'll begin with pop-up menus. When one of our clients requested pop-up menus, we spent a full day hunting down tutorials and code and trying to get it to behave as we wanted it to. We made it work in the end, but with compromises. With Fireworks 4, this pop-up menu would've taken all of fifteen minutes to make it behave exactly as we wanted. A simple wizard handles the entire process, you just have to define the variables and tell Fireworks where your pop-ups should appear. Unfortunately, Fireworks currently supports absolute placement, so you can assign pop-ups to appear relative to a floating menu bar. Well, you can, but not without altering the code by hand. That, of course, is the drawback of wizards. I'm sure Fireworks' pop-up capabilities will grow more open and robust as the product evolves.