Review: Dreamweaver CS4 beta

Adobe Dreamweaver, for better or for worse, is probably the most mature integrated development environment for website building for the Mac. Professionals might be supplied with Dreamweaver through their company’s site-license; beginners might get Dreamweaver on the recommendation of a friend.Hard-core coders have their favorite text editors and IDEs. This review is not for them. To be clear, I use Coda and TextMate almost exclusively for web development. This review is for people who use Dreamweaver primarily as a WYSIWYG HTML editor (as much as that makes me cringe). But that’s what Dreamweaver does best.

The public beta of Dreamweaver CS4 dropped on Tuesday, and I’m going to show you what’s new and different about Dreamweaver CS4, and if it’s worth the upgrade.

Weavin’ your dreams, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry

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Adobe releases Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth betas

Adobe Labs today released public betas for the next generation of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth apps, part of their Creative Suite product.Once downloaded and launched, the betas will only be active for 48 hours — unless you have a CS3 license. Creative Suite 3 customers will be able to extend the trial period (presumably until the final versions are released, though the deactivation date is not mentioned in the press release).

The Dreamweaver beta includes a much-anticipated (at least by me) change to the WebKit rendering engine for previewing and live editing.

Fireworks has been re-vamped to look and feel more like other Creative Suite apps, and now allows users to export design comps as interactive PDF documents.

The Soundbooth beta now includes multiple track support, and the new ability to match volume levels across multiple files. Plus, users can preview MP3 compression settings before saving them.

Soundbooth (719MB) requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later, running on an Intel processor. Fireworks (634MB) and Dreamweaver (262MB) have the same OS requirement, but can run on a G5 processor or better.

Thanks, Kent![Read]

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