Product Review: Dreamweaver 3
January 26, 2000
The Rest
Dreamweaver 3 sports a number of additional minor
conveniences, from simple special character support (for all
those copyright symbols) to cleaning up the
XML horror produced
by Microsoft Word. The new "design notes" help
foster teamwork, or internal politics (depending on the team),
by allowing developers to leave status notes attached to each
page for team members to see upon opening the file for
editing, such as "Status: Final" or "John never
accepts my edits anyway", that sort of thing.
In theory you can launch Macromedia's companion Fireworks
graphics package to edit page elements within Dreamweaver,
but trying to do so on this 128MB RAM Windows 98 machine
resulted in an "out of memory" error, alas.
This may not necessarily be Dreamweaver or Fireworks' fault
since memory management in Windows is akin to sorcery in the
17th century.
The Money
Dreamweaver 3 is a great product, to be sure, and the most
capable and comfortable web page design tool that has come
across this desk -- text editors aside. But it's not a cheap
product, and at as much as 399 clams for a new user, well,
that's one big clambake. If you are a web professional who
can deduct these sorts of purchases, or an employee purchasing
on behalf of your well-heeled department, Dreamweaver 3 is
most certainly worth it. Again, the package includes
Fireworks 3, a handy graphics tool especially for web-oriented
design if you don't already have such an elf in your workshop.
For the user who already owns Dreamweaver 2, though, the
upgrade to version 3 is going to cost at least another $199,
and as much as $249 if you don't also own an earlier
Fireworks. Are the enhancements in Dreamweaver 3 really worth
20 pizzas more than version 2? For many, the answer will be
no. Understandably so -- the core development environment is
the same as in version 2, and the majority of enhancements
are nice and convenient but not at all necessary for
continued web development. It would be uplifting to see
Macromedia drop $100 off the upgrade cost to better scale
to the improvements in this third release,
and better reward the loyal users of their product.
Product Review: Dreamweaver 3
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