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Dallas / Fort Worth Adobe User Group

Archive for category Dreamweaver

The Week in Dreamweaver – 8/31/2007

Aug 31

Posted by Gene in Ajax, ASP, ColdFusion, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, FLEX | Comments off

Here, let me help you spin some wheels while you're waiting for the three-day weekend to start. This week we have "deprecated" features in Dreamweaver, a nifty Fireworks command for those of us who need to provide quick comps, how to set up development environments, and Flex vs Ajax benchmarking.

Scott Fegette points to Deprecated features in Dreamweaver, a new TechNote in the Dreamweaver Support Center that warns of features to be dropped in the next version of Dreamweaver. Nothing there i'll miss. How about you? (Scott provides some insight in the comments.)

The Dreamweaver Developer Center has posted new tutorials on setting up a Dreamweaver development environment for ASP and for ColdFusion.

The Dev Center also has a new article on the Demo Current Document command for Adobe Fireworks CS3. Viktor Goltvyanitsa's command quickly exports "mockups and wireframes into a slick slideshow geared for giving presentations to clients or colleagues."

Going to steal some of Chris Long's thunder and point to some impressive benchmarking of Flex vs several flavors of Ajax. If this is important to your work, it's worth wading through the back-and-forth in the comments before making technical choices based on these results. The original test code was written by James Ward who has posted the source so that others can test on in their own environments. Via John Dowdell, who quotes one of the negative comments: "The problem is that _my boss_… could take look at [these results], and ask me to redo our apps using Flex…." Every silver lining has a dark cloud, doesn't it?

The Week in Dreamweaver – 8/26/2007

Aug 26

Posted by Gene in AIR, ColdFusion, CSS, Dreamweaver | Comments off

The last week or so in Dreamweaver sees additional info about developing for AIR in DW CS3, new color scheme functionality in Fireworks, and some warranted grumpiness about ColdFusion 8 documentation.

You've probably seen Adobe's color scheme generator, Kuler, on Adobe Labs. Ben Pritchard has ported Kuler into Adobe Fireworks via an extension he created (he'd already done the same for Adobe Flash).


Scott Fegette, Technical Product Manager for Dreamweaver at Adobe, has a couple of useful articles about the AIR Extension for Dreamweaver CS3. The first is about building an RSS viewer using AIR. The second is a demo of configuring the AIR extension to build and deploy AIR applications.

Scott also points to the release of Eric Meyer's CSS Sculptor for Dreamweaver from WebAssist. Not free, but if you are just getting started with CSS and need standards-compliant layouts to help you out, probably worth your time.

Jake Munson is unhappy about the dumbing-down of the ColdFusion 8 documentation that ships in the CF8 update for Dreamweaver (the attributes tables are not in the final version of the docs, even though they were included in a beta release). Adobe's Randy Nielsen shows up in the comments to explain and offer assistance with Jake's project.

i agree with Jake. i reference those tables all the time. All is not lost, however–the missing info is included in the LiveDocs version. Still, y'know. Ouch.

Introductions

Aug 20

Posted by Gene in Dreamweaver | 1 Comment

Hi, everyone. i've been tagged to keep us up to date on all things Dreamweaver. i expect i'll include in my brief other Adobe products that are related primarily to web design–products like Contribute and Fireworks–as well as web-related technologies like CSS. My first entry will be an introduction to myself and also an introduction to my favorite online resource for web-related technologies.

i've been using Dreamweaver since version 2, which was when i joined Macromedia back in the last millenium (1998, that was). i was lead developer in the Education Marketing group there until early 2006 (shortly after the Adobe acquisition*). That gave me an opportunity to be involved in a lot of web-based learning projects, using Flash, Dreamweaver, and ColdFusion, and i wrote quite a bit of curriculum. Still doing some of that these days, since i now have my own consulting business in instructional design and Adobe is one of my clients.

i sat next door to the Fireworks team here in Richardson for a number of years, which means i'm still learning Photoshop and some of the other Adobe graphic design tools. Fireworks is not a habit i intend to break.

Enough about me. Let me offer you something useful: my favorite web-based technology resource: Community MX. As a freelancer and web developer, this is the most useful site in my bookmarks. i have to stay up-to-date on a lot of technologies (and quite frankly, i don't), and Community MX always seems to have very practical articles and tutorials at a variety of levels. Although it is a subscription-based site, they offer a number of articles for free (for instance, here's a useful one on Feed Tools in Dreamweaver 8 and CS3: RSS and XSL that is available to non-members). It started out as a site dedicated to Macromedia products, but for the last couple of years, the weekly articles and tutorials have widened their focus to include all Adobe products, other technologies (like PHP), and helpful tips for running your own business.

i really started paying attention to the site several years ago when i needed to get up to speed on CSS. One of the perennials at Community MX is their CSS JumpStarts. These are CSS layouts and stylesheets that you can use and modify freely for your own purposes. They come not only with the stylesheets but the original art files and instructions for making a variety of updates. Using these JumpStarts not only gave a couple of my projects a quick leg up, but they also taught me a lot about CSS best practices along the way.

The annual subscription rate of $200 may seem a bit steep when it comes to actually getting out my wallet (because i'm such a cheapskate), but not so much when i compare it to other training sites, and definitely not when i take into account costs of the development time i've saved.

*Macromedians always referred to it as the "Merger."