Dreamweaver CS3 Review

Innovative new features and Photoshop integration fortify this upgrade to Dreamweaver

May 15, 2007

PAGE 2

Dreamweaver CS3 also remembers the location of the original Photoshop PSD document—but only if you’re using Photoshop CS3. Clicking on Dreamweaver’s Edit button launches Photoshop and opens the PSD file; after making changes in Photoshop, you just copy the layer, the slice, or the portion of the image you want, and then paste the new, edited image back into Dreamweaver. The old image is replaced, and all of the optimization settings you applied previously are reapplied.

And this version of Dreamweaver includes Adobe’s new Device Central. This program (which is integrated with several other programs in the suite) shows how different mobile devices display Web content. You can preview a Dreamweaver CS3 page in more than 200 different mobile-device profiles; each profile simulates the display of a particular phone—in many cases, complete with a photo of the phone. Each profile also includes information about the phone’s screen size and the type of HTML, Flash, and video it supports. Device Central uses Opera Mini (a browser for handheld devices) to simulate the Web-page display. Since not all phones ship with Mini, what you see in Device Central may not exactly match what appears on a particular phone.

Building the New Web
One of the most significant additions in this version of Dreamweaver is a new set of tools for adding interactive elements to a Web page. Based on the Spry framework, these new tools go far beyond the eye candy of Dreamweaver’s old timeline animations, and they’re a significant improvement on the simplistic JavaScript produced by the previous Dreamweaver behaviours. Spry widgets—prebuilt blocks of code that you can insert into your pages—add helpful user-interface elements to a page; the Spry Menu Bar widget, for example, is a navigation bar that supports two levels of pop-up menus—the perfect way to cram a lot of links into a compact space. Form-validation widgets are coded to ensure that data is submitted correctly—for example, to make sure that a field isn’t empty or that it contains a properly formatted e-mail address or phone number. This widget offers more features and produces much more professional-looking forms than the Validate Form behaviour that shipped with Dreamweaver for years. Several other page widgets make it easy to present a lot of content in a small space; for example, the Tabbed Panels widget lets you place content into separate tabbed areas, each of which is revealed by clicking on a tab.

Continued...
< PREV | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | NEXT >

back to index