[Macworld]

Post your comments for Review: Dreamweaver CS4 here

[Hurley42]

Buy Coda and don't look back, nuff said.

[AldoraWorld]

Lemme give a second nod to Coda. It makes Dreamweaver seem like a joke.

[cbh]

I don't miss GoLive's bugs, but I do miss the interface. I haven't spent a lot of time with DW up to now, but what time I have spent has been pretty uninspiring.

[Jeter2Fan93]

A third nod for Coda.

[dfs]

Quoth the reviewer: ". In my day-to-day usage Dreamweaver CS4 is substantially more stable than Dreamweaver CS3, with far fewer crashes and hang ups." Yes!!!! Because in the CS4 version Adobe has finally got around to fixing a lot of CS3 bugs of which it must have been aware throughout the CS4 development cycle, but it never saw fit to fix with a CS3 maintenance upgrade (save for one relevant only to a couple of language-localized versions, Adobe has never issued one). It so happens that I myself don't have any especial need for the improvements in CS4. If it weren't for those nasty CS3 bugs that destablize it, I'd pass on this upgrade. But here I am, having to pay just to get those bugfixes. I don't want to get on my high horse about what is and is not ethical in the software industry, but am I the only person who thinks that Adobe has done the dirty to its CS3 customers?

[Flaming_Carrot]

Yep, Coda is real nice for hand coding. Couple it with MAMP Pro running as a local webserver directly on your computer and then you have a great development server solution too.

[robertRoss]

Or get away from static sites entirely, as well as outdated form based database driven sites and use a proper content management system like MODx.

[Edac2]

Macromedia programs, especially Dreamweaver and Flash, have always seemed buggy to me. None of the updates to date, either from Macromedia or Adobe, have helped much except to add additional buggy features. I'm anxious to try out Dreamweaver CS4 and see if it is finally worthy of replacing my copy of BBEdit (but I'll also take a look at Coda, Hurley42).

[tewha]

I used to use Dreamweaver 3 and 4 -- not CS3 and CS4, but 3.0 and 4.0 -- and to be honest I quite liked it. It took watching the code window to keep it honest, but I expected that. Its CSS support was not great, but was good enough.
At some point, I started just using as simple HTML as I could and doing everything in CSS. Dreamweaver wasn't good at that at the time. Though later upgrades have improved it, I'm sure, I've been in the habit of using bare text editors for too long now.
But looking at screenshots of Dreamweaver CS4, I really have to wonder at the team working on it. It looks much less professional, friendly and (dare I say) stylish now than the six year old version I last used.

[leicaman]

The one thing I missed from GoLive that Dreamweaver now has is support for smart objects. That's a big plus I doubt Coda supports. I've been very happy with all the new CS4 apps in the Design Suite Premium.

[davebarnes]

One simple question: Can I copy in MS Word 2008 and paste into DW CS4 and have it work correctly?

[dfs]

If your question is "can I create some text in Word and then cut-and-paste it into Dreamweaver in such a way that formatting (or at least such things as italics and boldface) is preserved and Unicode glyphs carry over properly, without introducing all that goofy and superfluous Microsoft html coding",the answer is yes. You can do this in CS3 too. For some reason I can't really explain, I like to play it safe and bring over small chunks of text, no more than a paragraph or so at a time, although this may work with larger blocks of text just as well. I hope that this is the question you were trying to ask and that I have answered it satisfactorily.

[eyot08]

Coda works fine but it's just for nerds. For me as a designer DW works far better and faster. DW CS4 in my opinion doesnt bring a lot new however to cs3.