Dreamweaver 8 - another letdown. :(

[mainstreetmark]

When the first MX came out, it was really quite amazing. When MX2004 came out, it was just exactly like MX, except it rammed stylesheets down your throat.

Now, 8 is out (which I guess is MX2005 or something), and it's the same "barely anything new" upgrade. Should be called MX2004.1.

- "Background FTP" - all this turned out to be was a modeless dialog instead of a modal dialog. You still can't queue up another FTP save, while one is going on.
- "Tabbed Interface" - Finally! However, they don't work. When I click on a tab, the current doc is hidden, and I have to click a second time to get the new doc to show.
- When I drag the window, in the normal way, the window and the little toolbar drag like normal, but the content (the sourcecode) stays behind in the old location.
- I downloaded the 30 day demo yesterday. Today, I have 31 days left. Actually, that's a good thing, because I currently don't intend to pay for this, and go back to MX2004.

I've never seen anything like this. Macromedia has lost it's focus and will have to work hard to keep me as a customer. (but, sadly, there's no other dev tools out there that do all that I need to do. TextMate? Close. BBEdit? Bloated.)

 

[Soulstorm]

When the first MX came out, it was really quite amazing. When MX2004 came out, it was just exactly like MX, except it rammed stylesheets down your throat.

Now, 8 is out (which I guess is MX2005 or something), and it's the same "barely anything new" upgrade. Should be called MX2004.1.

- "Background FTP" - all this turned out to be was a modeless dialog instead of a modal dialog. You still can't queue up another FTP save, while one is going on.
- "Tabbed Interface" - Finally! However, they don't work. When I click on a tab, the current doc is hidden, and I have to click a second time to get the new doc to show.
- When I drag the window, in the normal way, the window and the little toolbar drag like normal, but the content (the sourcecode) stays behind in the old location.
- I downloaded the 30 day demo yesterday. Today, I have 31 days left. Actually, that's a good thing, because I currently don't intend to pay for this, and go back to MX2004.

I've never seen anything like this. Macromedia has lost it's focus and will have to work hard to keep me as a customer. (but, sadly, there's no other dev tools out there that do all that I need to do. TextMate? Close. BBEdit? Bloated.)

I second that thought. I have been using dreamweaver for years. I think it's the only application for the mac that has so many features. But there are some things that are frustrating.

First of all, the application is SLOW! When it starts for the first time, everything seems to be OK. But after a while, when I try to write something in Greek (because I live in greece) the app slows down approximately 3 second before it shows on screen the things I wrote.

This, of course, happens only in foreign languages, and not in english. Why? Haven't the last 2 major program upgrades given Macromedia enough time to optimize this program for foreign languages?

Also, this thing you describe with the tabs gets me mad, too. I'll stick with Dreamweaver MX2004, why paying for the same thing again?

 

[Nermal]

Yeah, I downloaded 8 a few days ago, and I'm not impressed. Mine gave me 31 days too

 

[Soulstorm]

Yeah, I downloaded 8 a few days ago, and I'm not impressed. Mine gave me 31 days too

Perhaps they thought that 30 days were not enough to evaluate all of Dreamweaver 8's new features

 

[mainstreetmark]

I have had the same issue, except in English. You start typing, and it beachballs for a bit and suddenly, a whole bunch of text shoots out. I attribute this to low memory, and it's a valid problem. I agree, you shouldn't be seeing this problem, but I bet more memory would fix it.

All my windows problems seem to have sorted themselves out, so I'll remove that one, but add a few more:

- Code Collapsing isn't savvy to code. it just collapses what you happen to have hilighted, which is almost entirely useless. Why would I want to select a bunch of code to hide?! What I WANT to do is collapse a functional heirarchy, or even an HTML table or something. It's pointless to think "Ah, hilight this particlular section and hide it..." For some reason, I can highlight a single charcater, say "a", and it displays as "{a...}"
- Tabbed windows is extremely nice! I wish I had an option to make a new tabbed window for each 'site', however.
- The hilighting seems goofy. If I put the cursor at the beginning of a line and "shift-down" to select a line, it selects the line and 1 indenting tab. That sucks.
- The code rewriting seems less annoying on some fronts (backspacing to correct a broken <table> tag doesn't create another </table> tag) but more annoying in others - you can't type "<br>"

So, in summary:
- Improved but by no means acceptable, FTP. (you can't queue operations)
- Tabbed interface! ....when it works
- generally very little improvement over MX2004.

Macromedia has become bloated, and I no longer wish to give them business.

 

[wheezy]

Perhaps it's because Adobe acquired Macromedia......perhaps. My Multimedia Teacher at school was not happy in the slightest about that, feared that Adobe would screw it over....perhaps the evidence is showing.

 

[TheMonarch]

Thank you!... I knew that the year I got all my pro apps was the best time. MX Studio is so awesome, none of the newer one have added any value really. And don't get me started on Photoshop, 7 was by far, the best deal. This whole CS crap was sort of disappointing, but meh, why even bother with CS2...