Dreamweaver CS4 finally feels like part of the Creative Suite. The revamped interface now shares the look and feel of Photoshop, Flash, and Illustrator.
In addition, support for Photoshop Smart Objects streamlines the preparation and editing of graphic assets for your websites.
Web professionals, who have often looked down on the WYSIWYG orientation of Dreamweaver, will find many useful features that make working with HTML, CSS and JavaScript faster. The new related files bar provides a fast way to jump to and edit CSS and JavaScript files used by a web page, while the code navigator provides a tool for quickly analyzing the styles that affect the current selection.
And Dreamweaver CS4's new Live View provides a real-time preview based on WebKit that lets you not only see how your page looks in a browser, but also pause a JavaScript program so that you can analyze the resulting HTML code as well as edit the CSS that formats it.
Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 also sports useful features for web designers who aren't completely fluent in JavaScript, CSS or HTML. The property inspector has been revamped making it harder for newbies to create bad CSS, and several improvements to the Spry tools introduced in CS3 make it easy for non-programmers to add tool-tip pop-up windows, form validation for radio buttons and create complex, interactive Web pages using a basic HTML table.
For web designers burdened by client requests to "change just one little thing" on their websites, Adobe is introducing a new web-based service named "InContext Editing". This service lets busy web designers unload the mundane details of updating text and images on a website on to their clients (or coworkers), who can use just a web browser to keep their site up to date. Dreamweaver CS4 provides tools for creating web pages that work with InContext Editing.
See also: Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) review
INDIVIDUAL CS4 APPS REVIEWED IN DETAIL:
Adobe After Effects CS4 review
Adobe Flash Professional CS4 review
THE SIX ADOBE CS4 SUITES REVIEWED:
Adobe CS4 Master Collection review
Adobe CS4 Production Premium review
Adobe CS4 Design Standard review
Adobe CS4 Design Premium review
See also:
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