EXCLUSIVES

By Ric Getter

In spite of increasingly stiff competition from Adobe, Macromedia clearly remains the market leader in web design and development applications for the Mac. But in terms of features and usability, it has become a tight race.

GoLive was the first out of the gate with OS X support. And, in terms of features and usability, GoLive 6 started to pull out ahead. But when Macromedia released its MX suite, Dreamweaver once again took the lead.

Dreamweaver MX has undergone three very obvious changes: it has been carbonized to run natively in OS X as well as 9, and it has undergone a significant facelift so there is a great deal more continuity with the other players in the MX suite. Possibly the most significant change is that the UltraDev developers' product has been rolled into Dreamweaver MX with all the tools and hooks for working with ASP, .NET, JSP, XHTML, and XML.

Thanks to the interface enhancements, the look and feel of Dreamweaver has changed considerably and it will take an experienced user a little while to get reoriented. The design now strikes a much better balance between convenience and limited screen real estate. The crowded little tool palette that resided on the left side of the screen has grown into a tabbed Insert Bar that runs along the top, where it is less obtrusive but has much more room. That's a good thing because this is where most of your tools for building dynamic web applications are stored.

A Panel of Experts

To the right of your work area is a bank of collapsible panels for working with design elements like style sheets, asset management tools and an extensive reference library. The latter has grown to include support for JavaScript, Cold Fusion (CFML), CSS, ASP, and other tags. There's also a section that offers a direct, Internet link to Macromedia's support and training databases that provides regular, informational updates without unwanted marketing or sales intervention. With earlier versions using a browser-based help system, Dreamweaver MX utilizes the native Mac OS help system, which in our installation, was a mixed blessing. Even though we could appreciate the fact that our browser no longer had to flip back and forth between our site and the help system, the initial load time for the Help Center (particularly under OS X) was painfully slow.

Cloaking Device

The Site Files window has more colorful iconography and some important additions. One new button at the top lets you connect to a separate testing/staging server. Enterprise-level developers will find this a most useful addition. But much more importantly, tucked down at the bottom of your file list is a new icon labeled "Computer." This is a Dreamweaver-resident portal to all the files on your system and even your local network. This is a useful feature that GoLive users have had since the program's introduction.

Another area where the program has significantly improved is its ability to validate code and test its compatibility with popular browsers (including several versions of Opera). Dreamweaver reports problems and does a decent job of prioritizing their severity. You can do this on a per-file basis or, if your self-esteem can handle it, for your entire site. Dreamweaver, in fact, has a virtual tradition of being able to do a number of editing and updating operations on a site-wide basis. MX now allows you to protect files and folders from these global updates with the new "cloaking" feature that is part of the Site Menu. You can also automatically cloak files with a given extension.

Dreamweaver integrates beautifully with the other members of the MX team, Fireworks, Flash, and ColdFusion. A button click will let you jump back to any of these programs to tweak a graphic or Flash animation and reload it into the page. The partnership between Dreameweaver, ColdFusion and Flash has been enhanced to simplify the process of driving Flash animations with dynamic data. Dreamweaver continues to be an open system, with literally thousands of extensions available from Macromedia and private developers.

Users of Dreamweaver 4 and earlier will immediately notice the extra capabilities the program inherited from UltraDev. On the positive side, they now have the opportunity to learn about data driven sites and possibly incorporate the technology into their static pages. On the negative side, the capabilities have given the application a lot more bulk and overhead and, on systems running at under 500 MHz, it can feel a bit sluggish. With enough memory, the program does get a little more responsive as more and more of its modules are brought into RAM. It's heritage also means that, unless you are upgrading or in a position to take advantage of an educational discount, the cost of entry is fairly high for a home or small business user.

Developing Teamwork

In spite of these issues, Macromedia has succeeded in providing a package that is useful to extraordinarily wide audience. The Site Setup Assistant, Tag Chooser, and easily handy reference tools make Dreamweaver accessible to a fairly new user. And as an enterprise development platform, it is a powerhouse with a number of new, developer-pleasing features. For example, the template feature has been greatly enhanced and now permits nesting templates within templates. Your development group can now build a basic page template and series of nested templates that can be plugged in as needed. The content people can then pick and choose among the sub-templates, rather than bugging the developers for innumerable, minor variations of the main template. The templates also offer a wider choice of which tags can and can't be modified.

Another handy feature for developers is the ability to store code "snippets." Unlike Library items, snippets can be incorporated into a page as-is and are neither flagged nor tracked for site-wide updates. The Library feature remains, but we would have been happier to see improved support for the more practical Server-Side Includes (SSIs).

If you are working on a large, dynamic site with at least part of the team running UltraDev, MX is an update that will easily pay for itself with its productivity enhancements. Even if you're working on a smaller scale, the improvements should be worth the price of the upgrade. For personal web sites, there is still no viable bridge between .Mac and the high-priced, pro packages like MX and GoLive or Front Page for Windows users. So it's hard to understand why Macromedia didn't keep a lower-cost version of Dreamweaver alive, without the dynamic data or collaboration features. Still, with the new site setup wizards, ample online reference material, and its ability to generate clean code and compatible sites, Dreamweaver is a very good place to start.

System Requirements: Power Mac G3 or better, Mac OS 9.1 or higher, or Mac OS X 10.1 or higher. Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. 96 MB of RAM (128 MB recommended). 275 MB available disk space. 256 color monitor capable of 800 x 600 resolution (1024 x 768, millions of colors recommended. Thousands of colors required for OS X.) $399 SRP for full version $199 Upgrade > www.macromedia.com