Dreamweaver MX 2004 + Panther: You In?

I'm running it on a 12" PB with Panther and it's ridiculously slow... When switching from another application back to DW it sometimes takes up to 10 seconds for all of the palates and toolbars to load. I'm pretty disapointed with its performance. Otherwise, it's a good product.

Only 10 seconds?

10 seconds is good, compared with DW MX on Jaguar...

Actually it seems to be much faster now. Not as fast as it should be, but not that slow.

Macromedia points a quick finger at virus scanning software. With DW's extensibility, it has a lot of JavaScript files to build those menus, etc. Some virus scanners will scan the JS files *every time* they're opened.

If you have virus scanning software running, and can set it to ignore .js files, you might see an improvement in performance. If you can't be that selective with your virus scanner, you might try disabling it temporarily and see how it impacts speed.

I tried and the difference was perceivable, but not significant with Jaguar and DW MX. Don't have virus software running now to compare Panther and 2004.

I'm still waiting for the orders to come in at work.

I'll report back here when I can test it out.

i tried the whole mx 2004 suite... i was about to kill someone when i was trying to use flash. i just wanted to make a simple drawing as a test and it took about 10 minutes.

way to go macromedia (sarcasm)

I've got the educational version of the 2004 suite. Dreamweaver is glacially slow on my dual G4/800 filled with RAM. FireWorks is the only thing that's close to quick--it's faster than Photoshop 7.

I'm not saying that Dreamweaver is unusable; only that it's not pleasant to use. If it was different in Jaguar, it wasn't enough to notice.

i've not been that impressed by its speed, or reliability for that matter - on my G3 900 iBook (640mb ram) its bearable but too slow for my liking, it seems to unexpectedly quit a hell of a lot too.

If you're just looking for a good HTML/PHP/ASP editor then i'd say bbedit; for WYSIWYG i wouldn't know what to suggest as I stick to the code view 90% of the time; WYSIWYG stuff (imho) is only handy for tables and forms.

DW's CSS editor is the daddy; shame its so slow really.

Interestingly enough I was at the Apple Store the other day shopping for a PB and they had DW on a 15 incher, so I launched it. Took at least a minute to launch but everything else was super slow, too. I figured the machine was hosed (although there was not much else running on it at the time) but then I tried an imac they had and that was super slow, too. I am typing this in my trusty DT/233/OS9 and my wife commented that the PB I want to spend $2K+ on wasn't any faster than the computer at home (ouch!)

OTOH I have launched DW on a 15" PB at our local CompUsa and its performance was fine - at least comparable to or faster than the crappy Compaq P1.8 XP laptop my company gives me to use. In fact the CompUsa PB was 2 - 3 times faster all around than the one at the Apple Store. I posted at the General Apple forum whining about my Store experiences and there was much speculation that the machines there were in bad shape from all the use and abuse they get (I was there in the afternoon on a super-busy shopping day)

FWIW Dreamweaver (and all studio MX apps) are dogs in windows-land, too. Too bad, 'cause otherwise they're great programs!

Still waiting.

I hassled our purchasing person about it yesterday, so hopefully it'll be soon.

At least DW MX 2004 runs much faster on my 2x1,8 G5 & Panther than on my Dell Celeron 400MHz laptop with Win XP

Launcing it produces quite nice hoover effect as the fans run at full blast for a while - my G5 becomes very noisy when using Studio MX 2004 apps (lots of fan noise and the chirping noise becomes loud) otherwise they seem to work quite fine (fast enough for me)...

The trial I used on a dual G4 was dead slow as well.

Dreamweaver support staff claimed that they did extensive testing and had no problems.

After reading a lot of postings, I can only conclude that it's like the infamous SPSS 6: a small number of people can get it to work, but for most people, it's BAD.

WYSIWYG editors for OS X - the only one I know of that's not overpriced is the free Amaya which works under X11. We *REALLY* could use a nice Aqua ports, because the only problem with it that I could see, other than learning how it works is, was the oddball emacs-style key commands and the slow window redrawing and click-to-position nonsense that comes with X11.

Originally posted by happo
[BLauncing it produces quite nice hoover effect as the fans run at full blast for a while - my G5 becomes very noisy when using Studio MX 2004 apps (lots of fan noise and the chirping noise becomes loud) otherwise they seem to work quite fine (fast enough for me)... [/B]

Click to expand...

what does it mean when it makes those kind of noises? and will it do any damage?
I'm planning to use Flash on mine, is it worth it?


p.s excuse the newbieness

Haven't upgraded, and won't

The MX suite was a dog, and instead of fixing the myriad problems, MM wants me to pay for 2004, whose major attraction is new bugs and performance hits. Woohoo! Where do I sign?

Between my friends who have 2004, and the reviewers (i.e., MacWorld), I haven't yet heard a persuasive reason to upgrade.

So I'm sticking with the dog MX, instead of paying to get a new dog.

I'll take another look when 2005 is released.

Originally posted by Nermal
Interesting, I have DW 2004 and it's not slow. It's not fast either, but it's perfectly usable (certainly not "glacially slow" as bousozoku put it). Granted that I do have a 1.25 GHz G4 with 1.25 GB of memory.

And for the record, Flash is faster than DW on my system.

Click to expand...

Yes, Dreamweaver is the slowest of the suite.

I consider that the dual G4/533 at school was faster with Dreamweaver MX than my dual G4/800 is with Dreamweaver MX 2004. It's close enough to the movements of a glacier.

Played with it and it's stupid slow
... not ever gonna use it :-(

But is there any good wysiwyg editor ? Safari can display a page in under a sec ... ?!? why is it so dificult to build a good fast responsive editor ?! damn

love the old days when there was just director, photosjop and premiere


ps DM mx 04 is faster when displaying in just Design or Code bit ... just don't bother using the split view...

I really have to wonder why these programs are so slow and why, in Dreamweaver, the "window refocus" thing has never been fixed. Do they really have no resources for optimization? I think people would pay for an update whose sole new "feature" was "runs twice as fast."

(Or for GoLive, I think people would pay for something whose new feature was "runs as fast as version 6 but doesn't have all the bugs!")

slow here too on a 1GHz TiBook with 1GB.... well it's not slow when you're using it as such, but switching windows causes abit of a lag.... Macromedia are sh*t when it comes to updating and fixing the bugs in their app's...

GoLive CS eats it all the same...

Originally posted by allpar
I really have to wonder why these programs are so slow and why, in Dreamweaver, the "window refocus" thing has never been fixed. Do they really have no resources for optimization? I think people would pay for an update whose sole new "feature" was "runs twice as fast."

(Or for GoLive, I think people would pay for something whose new feature was "runs as fast as version 6 but doesn't have all the bugs!")

Click to expand...

They've been using MetroWerks CodeWarrior and the PowerPlant application framework. This is geared toward Mac OS 8.x, even the Carbon version. It uses the System 6-style event loop and therefore, produces substandard performance on Mac OS X. Metrowerks, late last year, introduced a new version of PowerPlant which is targeted only to Mac OS X, so if Macromedia would use it, it would help performance.

Then, they might actually profile the applications to see what's gone wrong.

The thing is, their applications would probably run much better on Windows too, but those machines have the raw power to grind past the inefficiency.

Thanks, that does explain a lot. So we can just hope they recompile and optimize a little and do an MX 2004.1 or whatever the version would be...or more likely charge $150 for an upgrade to 2005.

It's a bit more work, but we can hope.

Situation is very frustrating
You might want to try Dreamweaver MX 6.1 (that little update matters), it is actually usable on G3 350.

Yeah I have a 1ghz 17" PB and DW MX 2k4 is very very slow. I use it on my PC and it blazes.... very very distracting, hard to get work done.