Re: Spry, not so spry? Too little, too late?
I'm not convinced cramming every possible coding and development tool into Dreamweaver is a good idea. For many years Cold Fusion was Macromedia's answer to that question. It provided a development environment for those who needed it without bogging down (and complicating) Dreamweaver with all those high-end technologies. The last few versions of Dreamweaver under Macromedia began to include more of these web development tools, but they did not replace Cold Fusion. Still, as SSI, CSS, XML and now Ajax become more pervasive, I suppose it's inevitable that Dreamweaver will have to support more of these previously ancillary technologies. And Cold Fusion appears to be no longer in development - though you can still buy it from Adobe, along with a number of other moribund Macromedia applications, including FreeHand.
Interestingly, it appears that several Adobe products will be falling by the wayside along with those from Macromedia, as a result of the merger. Live Motion is long dead and GoLive soon will be. With the return of Premier to the Mac (Intel Mac only) the full compliment of Adobe programs available is quite impressive - as in the CS3 Master Collection, which has thirteen mainline applications and numerous supporting technologies, like Version Cue and Device Central.
As all these programs become well integrated into the Adobe Zeitgeist, I suspect that Microsoft's recent attempts to encroach into Adobe territory will wither and die. It takes more than money to make a good product. It also requires an understanding of the user experience that is totally beyond Microsoft's grasp. MS may have plenty of high-grade propeller heads to engineer their products, but they seem to have few if any who understand what a decent user interface should be. Vista, anyone?
Don't anthropomorphize computers -
They hate that.
