Cheap Dreamweaver MX 2004 Upgrade from Dreamweaver 4, MX, UltraDev 4, ColdFusion Studio 5.0, JRun Studio 3.x (Software) (Macintosh, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows XP) Price

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Customer Reviews of Dreamweaver MX 2004 Upgrade from Dreamweaver 4, MX, UltraDev 4, ColdFusion Studio 5.0, JRun Studio 3.x

Still using DW4? It's time to up to a really Big Rig.
Clearly Dreamweaver is the best application available for developing a professional website. If you're in the business this is your platform and that's all there is to it. Oh okay. The REAL professionals code by hand. (Yawn.)

As for me, I've been coding with Dreamweaver MX. What a great program. It comes to work everyday, fires right up and launches the client's pages smoothly along the 'ole information superhighway. No breakdowns (well, almost no breakdowns), no arresting offenses and no intramural collisions. Dreamweaver has all the efficiency and power of an 18-wheeler blowing past a gaggle of overloaded rental trucks dragging along unstable trailers and add-ons that threaten to careen out-of-control at any moment.

DW MX 2004 takes slightly longer to fire up, but its customizable insert bar, CSS support and code editing options keep this new version upgrade zooming right along. I wish the right-click slide out menu for files didn't require another slide out for editing such as page renaming, duplicating or deleting files. The simple workaround is leaning the keystrokes.

If you're using Dreamweaver 4, the 2004 upgrade is a must. For MX users, the new version 7.0 is a powerful improvement.

UNDERWHELMING UPDATE. WAIT FOR NEXT VERSION..
I've been designing with DW for a while now. The 2004 upgrade remains essentially the same, except for a few changes:

[1] The default is now CSS. If you want a tables based layout, you can still work with it but a change needs to be made in the preferences.

[2] The previous Dreamweaver MX supported CSS-P to a degree but editing it wasn't always easy. MM were obviously aware of Dreamweaver's rendering problems and for the new version, have borrowed upon Opera's rendering engine to do some of the hard work and it's now several magnitudes better.

[3] Secure FTP built in

[4] Microsoft Word and Excel copy and paste. Earlier version would lose the formatting when text was pasted inside DW. In this sense, DW now equals Frontpage

[5] On-the-fly cross-browser compatibility checking

[6] Some simple image editing like cropping and tonal adjustments without leaving the program

All this is fine and dandy, some of these features are also a god-send, but the CSS handling is a bit quirky yet. Surely, there must be a simpler and more intuitive way to do all this? There's far too much jumping around the interface required. Instead of providing one really inspired WYSIWYG way to do things, it seems to offer a multiplicity of mediocre alternatives, almost as if the programmers couldn't make their minds up and say, 'Hell, we'll put it all in'. That is a recipe for camels, not thoroughbred racehorses.

If you know your way around Dreamweaver already, you might welcome the new CSS editing facilities but 50% of the full price for an upgrade seems grossly excessive. I'm a bit disappointed that after all this time, Macromedia have produced something that is okay, but not great.

Besides, in the rush for an upgrade (now that GoLive is getting its own feet too) MM seems to have settled for some degree of bloat. My DW updated to 2004 MX is even more of a RAM hog than before.

Net net: I'd wait for the next version upgrade, by when hopefully MM would have tied in all these loose ends.