The interface
Like all of Macromedia's products, Dreamweaver 4 has received interface tweaks that make is cleaner and a little nicer to look at. But it also has functional interface enhancements as well, such as the ability to toggle between layout view, code view or a combination of layout and code views.

Dreamweaver 4's new combination code/layout view.

Also on the functional interface side, the new version sports several enhancements that make working in HTML a little more invisible. This includes more complete contextual menus (right clicking or Control clicking to call up functions related to a selection).

Table creation in the Layout view. The new (optional) view
lets you create tables and draw cells directly in the
document, rather than entering numerical data.

It also gives you the ability to do much more intuitive editing of page elements, including the ability to drag cells in a table rather than enter number values for heights and widths. And in the new Layout view, you can draw tables and cells directly on the page, as in the example above.

I should mention in this section that one of the things I don't like about Dreamweaver 4 is its snap-to interface. This becomes particularly annoying when you open a series of documents, which get hidden behind one another because they've all snapped to the same spot, so linking files becomes difficult.

Finally, there's one change to editing that you may or may not like. In Dreamweaver 3, Command-C copies text and code, while Shift-Command-C copied text only. In version 4, this is a little different (and a little hard to explain). Shift-Command-C now copies text and code, and pasting it into a document also pastes the code visibly. Command-C copies text and formatting, but pasting it into metas or link inputs does not paste the code in. There is now no way to copy unformatted text.

All in all, though, the interface does get some nice enhancements.

The rest of the new stuff
The primary thrust of Dreamweaver 4 was the introduction of Flash graphics and interface enhancements. But there are several other new features that might come in handy as well.

One of the major ones is JavaScript debugging. This gives you the ability to debug client-side JavaScript directly in the browser. It lets you watch JavaScript execute in Navigator or Explorer, helping you understand how each browser implements JavaScript. You can then debug your code by setting breakpoints and then watching your variables update as you step through the code.