FTA: The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically. Dynamically-generated web applications, from Amazon right down to the humble blog, all offer much more – in-built commenting, voting, RSS feeds, etc Рthan the best sites built on static HTML can ever hope to provide. Read it here.

My take… while I don’t use Dreamweaver, and I don’t like WYSIWYG editors in general, I feel the author is so misguided here in his criticism of the well known Adobe web design tool. He compares Dreamweaver to Drupal and Joomla (two market leading open source content management systems), pointing out that most sites of any scale these days rely on application functionality, ie. RSS, content rating, comments, etc.

Now, while these “Web 2.0″ features certainly are important for user engagement, the actual tool you use for creating the design template used in a site powered by a CMS DOESN’T MATTER! Dreamweaver’s use doesn’t prohibit you from using a CMS, and vice versa. I’m not sure what Tom Arah, the original author of the article, does for a living when he isn’t writing half baked articles for PCPro, but I would be very surprised if it were web design. I can imagine him in a client meeting telling a customer that the Web Server they have doesn’t work with Firefox or that JPGs are obsolete because of iPhones or JQuery is a new database language… Ooh I love unrelated hyperbolic comparisons. Too fun… Let’s try some more. Submit a completely ridiculous web design comparison to my comments here. I need a laugh.

Now, that aside, I do have trouble believing that Dreamweaver is as relevant now as it was a handful of years of ago. With tools like Coda and Expresso out in full force, Eclipse/Aptana offering powerful debugging features and dozens of other free and easy to use text editors out there, I have to think that a WYSIWYG editors appeal is much more limited that it was then. With Web Developer toolbars, Firebug,¬† Safari’s developer toolbar and tons of other design aids for your browser, a design view is pretty pontless IMHO. Simply write your markup, edit or tweak your CSS and tab to a browser window and refresh. Web design, in the world of media production and interactive development is about the easiest deliverable you can preview. What I mean here is that there is virtuall no penalty for tweaking and previewing. Not so in video or compositing, any substantial change requires a new render or RAM preview. This is also not the case in RIA development. You may need to compile your runtime (SWF, Silverlight, etc), upload it to your server and make a tweak to the middleware code, too… You get what I am saying, i think. A design time WYSIWYG offers no real benefit. When you consider that Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG rendering engine is not Gecko, Explorer or Webkit, it becomes clear that WYSIWYG is actually something more like “What You See Is Wishful thinking Ya Goober” – WYSIWtYG!

That said, Dreamweaver’s editor tool isn’t that bad, and when used only a text editor, it’s okay. It is expensive for that purpose alone though, so unless you are using the site management tools (which I don’t care for – it’s FTP is atrocious), or it’s server behaviors (which are pretty limiting and notoriously brittle – not allowing much customization), or it’s AJAX editing (I won’t touch Spry, sorry) then you may just want to move on. So it’s not so much dying, at least not from the perspective mentioned by Tom Arah, it’s just fading into irrelevance due to lack of upkeep.

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If you are familiar with Actionscript 3 and XML/XHTML/CSS learning Flex should come pretty naturally to you, that said, the Adobe Flex Development team has put together a series of videos that look to aid that considerably. Not only would training like this typically cost at least a couple hundred dollars if purchased from a company like Total Training, you would also need to play them on DVDs or pop them in your computer. These videos play nicely in a BrightCove player and can be gone through at your own pace. For my students reading this… Go through these tutorials! You’ll need it for building mashups!

Straight from Adobe… Possibly the most anxiously awaited RIA development of the year. Adobe Apollo Public alpha to be released on Adobe labs imminently. I’m excited… are you excited? Sounds a bit rough around the edges as Bit-101 puts it, but I am still really looking forward to it. Hope that the Webkit stuff is at least semi-functional.

EDIT: Removed reference to Mike Chambers as Product Manager for Apollo, it is indeed Mike Downey, as he pointed out in the comments below. Apologies to both parties.

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What will the decency police say to this? Makes the hot coffee mod look a little tame IMHO, this is a sanctioned/designed part of gameplay. I’m pretty open minded, so it doesn’t really bother me a bit, but I can’t imagine this game being released like this after all the flack that RockStar took last year from Congress. Is this real? A spoof? A machinima? Can anyone out there confirm or debunk this?

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I am kind of torn on articles like this. I realize photoshop/illustrator is a very useful tool for producing designs. A necessary tool, even. I also realize that Imageready/Fireworks are needed to compress the images to make them web friendly. I’m not above using Dreamweaver when needed to bang out a quick design or two as well… but call me old fashioned. I don’t like the XHTML/CSS output by design tools like Imageready.

Using the argument that this is for mockups/prototypes will only get you so far, in my opinion. Why not just send a JPG? An HTML page with a JPG placed on it? A flash prototype, anything… why am I so against this… I guess it’s cuz I know most people just won’t go up and clean up the CSS or the HTML and we’ll just end up witha junk markup, non semantic, non search engine friendly page.

Dreamweaver 9, you better be good!

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The list is hilarious, but I feel they missed a couple of my favorites.

1. Good guys use Macs, bad guys use PCs.
2. Fingerprint scanning systems have really cool GUIs that show not only the print they are currently scanning, but also the number of matching points and the photo of the person the print is currently being compared against, for just a split second.
3. No one uses windows. Everyone uses some sort of OS developed by a Flash developer or some sort of KDE/Gnome theme.
4. When you connect to a remote system you have to call it something cool, like “uplinking”, or “jacking in”.
5. Even broadband connected computers have to go through a connection routine akin to dialing in via modem.
6. All systems at CTU have keyloggers and remote access/VNC on them.

Whenever I watch TV with my wife and I notice these, I usually can’t help but let out an amused snort.

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