Macromedia Dreamweaver MX

Macromedia has also expanded the reference section, where you can look up information from a selection of electronic books supplied by the likes of O'Reilly and Wrox. The former provides the HTML, JavaScript and CSS reference; the latter provides ASP 3 and JSP reference, and Macromedia itself provides the data for the reference sections on Sitespring and ColdFusion. There's also a reference section provided by Usablenet on accessibility. Having all this information a few clicks away certainly saves having a pile of reference books open on your desk, and over time these will be undoubtedly added to through the Macromedia extension system as they've done in the past.

One of the docking windows called Answers is also worth further investigation. This links over the Internet to the Macromedia site and provides you with the latest uploaded extensions, or the top three technical notes from the site, as well as having the ability to search the support site, all within the Dreamweaver environment. Macromedia stresses that this will not be used to push marketing information to users. Further help is available to the hand coder in the form of pop-up code hints when working in Code view, which provide a drop-down list of code options as you type. This help extends to HTML tags as well, and you can add to and customise these lists to easily add a new tag. Never again will you have to remember the spelling of a particular tag attribute.

Once you've coded your masterpiece, Macromedia has provided a new option on the File menu to print out your code, which it will do with line numbers and in colour - Dreamweaver MX has colour hinting for various different pieces of code.

Dreamweaver MX is available for both Windows and Mac platforms; the Mac version is carbonised and so should support all of OS 10.1 user interface enhancements. The Windows version is fully compatible with XP, and both versions support SSH secure transfer of login information within the Dreamweaver ftp client, which is used to upload Web sites.

Dreamweaver MX has built on previous versions and the improvements enable it to move forward and embrace the new technologies of the Web. In doing this, Macromedia hasn't forgotten that this product will still be used to design and maintain static Web sites and many of the improvements will help in this respect.

Author: Mark Newton