by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

I reviewed Macromedia Fireworks 4 last week. It actually arrived on my desk as a bundle with Dreamweaver 4, but I thought I'd separate out the two for more thorough examinations. So this week we arrive at Dreamweaver 4, which, like Fireworks, I've been using in one incarnation or another daily for more than a year. It's the kind of tool that defines a product category and forces every other developer to try to match it feature for feature. But with the release of version 4, this is a challenge that's becoming harder and harder to answer.

I don't want to imply that Dreamweaver is the only good Web design and/or layout application on the market. It certainly is not, especially if your particular Web needs tend toward the online brochure types, where there are many applications tailored for these purposes. But I come from the perspective of writing for, editing for, managing content for and handling graphics for two pretty complex daily Web sites—Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer. I couldn't imagine doing it with anything other than Dreamweaver.

I also don't want to slight Adobe GoLive, an extremely viable contender in the same category as Dreamweaver. GoLive is a strong product with some features not found in Dreamweaver, such as its built-in video editing capabilities. But I'm not going to sit here and compare the two feature by feature. Rather, I'm going to cover what I think are the strengths (and weaknesses) of Dreamweaver in and of itself. I'll do the same for GoLive in the coming weeks.

So let's get into Dreamweaver.

Out with the old ...
On the whole, I find Dreamweaver 4 to be a much more comfortable application than Dreamweaver 3. It plays better with our Linux server, both in terms of speed and reliability; its management of local files, particularly in terms of the reliability of link updates, has been improved; and, in general, it works faster and more efficiently. Dreamweaver 3 was sometimes a bit laggy when dealing with remote files. It didn't always update links properly when rearranging local files.

I had troubles at first getting Dreamweaver to connect to the remote server. But, after a quick chat with a support tech at Macromedia, I discovered the problem was with our local NT server. Switching the default firewall port in Dreamweaver fixed this.

I also had a problem with my site cache for Digital Media Designer. This was mostly a limitation of the Mac OS, however. Dreamweaver stores a site's cache in a text file named after the name of a particular site, as defined in the program's site definitions. If the site name is too long, Dreamweaver can't write the cache file. So fixing this problem was simply a matter of truncating my site name in my site definitions.

After resolving these two problems, I've been working with very few gripes and have been able to focus on some of the new features that make Dreamweaver 4 even more powerful than its predecessor.

Flash graphics
Of course, at the top of every Web designer's hit parade these days is Flash, and Macromedia has not overlooked its appeal in the latest Dreamweaver release. Version 4 adds the ability to create Flash buttons and text-based graphics on the fly, maintaining their editability directly within Dreamweaver. No switching to the Flash application. No complicated design. You just enter your data in a dialogue box (shown below), and you're on your way.

The Flash button creator in Dreamweaver 4 allows you to create
Flash buttons without leaving Dreamweaver.

If you decide you want to change the content or style of a button, you just double click it, and the same dialog box appears again.

For those who find buttons too constraining, there's also Flash text. Flash text is similar in many ways to Flash buttons, including in terms of editability, but it's not so constrained by size as buttons are.

The Flash info panel.