Dreamweaver UltraDev 4.0 Upgrade (from UltraDev Only)

Rating:
Summary: As a web designer...
Review: ...no two pieces of software make my job easier than Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Managing multiple large sites is a breeze with these two, and allows me to all but give up hand coding (and focus more on design). Older versions required much more tweaking of the code in order to get some results, but with version 4.0, Macromedia has succeeded in making DW generate such good code, that I rarely have to fiddle with it. The features and ease of use are top of the line, and out do GoLive and other competing software in many areas. Fireworks is a must for easily creating great navigation and slicing up images in a fraction of the time it used to take. I still rely on Photoshop for many things, but most all other work is done in these two apps.

IF YOU ARE A BEGINNER: I HIGHLY reccomend purchasing this package, as you will be creating semi-complex sites in no time. While it helps to know HTML/JavaScript, you don't need to know much about them with this software.

IF YOU A PROFESSIONAL: Whether you are still hand coding (waiting for WYSIWYG editors to write better code), or using a competing product like GoLive, you must get your hands on these two. They are the best in the industry, and are must haves. Especially for designers/developers who work alone or in a small crew and are responsible for multiple sites and need to make updates quickly.

Software rarely is made this well.

Rating:
Summary: Great combo
Review: Dreamweaver 4 is awesome as a WYSIWYG HTML editor, but it lets you get under the hood and fix code manually, too, if that's your bag. The HTML it generates is actually not that bad, either, if you know what to look for, so it can be a great time saver. The price may be prohibitively steep for novices or home users, but it's unquestionably worth the investment if you're buying for the office.

Fireworks 4 is...um...interesting. I'm a Photoshop and Illustrator power-user, and must admit that I've been intrigued by Fireworks. If you're designing straight for the web, it's a great tool for the extra few bucks, but if you're doing print work too, stick with Photoshop. That being said, Fireworks does lots of cool stuff that neither Adobe program can do. A word of warning, though: Fireworks is a very full-featured application, and it may be a little overwhelming or confusing for novices. On the other hand, the robust feature set is balanced by an excellent help system and tutorials. Even Dreamweaver comes with an entire HTML reference book accessible from a palette in the interface. Nice touches like this really make this package shine.

Rating:
Summary: Simply THE best web dev combination
Review: DreamWeaver Rocks. Fireworks Rocks. Together they make for a spectacular web design/development combination.

Dreamweaver is packed with features for the beginner through advanced web developer; it's easy and intuitive to use. It may take you a while to learn all the capabilities, but with each successive feature you discover and master, the development process becomes easier and faster.

Fireworks is the best in class web graphics software. It integrates very well with DreamWeaver. Creating animated GIFs is a snap, as is image optimization (file compression), image map creation, and exploring full tables (HTML and all!) for use in DreamWeaver.

You simply cannot go wrong with this package. Photoshop still has its place, but if you focus exclusively on the web and don't need to do exquisite image editing this bundle is all you need.

Rating:
Summary: Almost perfect integration between the 2 Apps
Review: First of all I must say that i am a user of both this tools for quite some time and they do help me. I'm what you can call a coder, I like to know exactly what is written in the source code so that I can change it to my behalf. The problem with frontpage is that the code generated is very confusing and doesn't work very well on all browsers (although frontpage2000 improved a lot).

With Dreamweaver 4 you can insert your code directly and see the effect on your webpage happen simultaneous or do the inverse, insert the things you want in your design view with macromedia's simple menu and subwindow system. The code dreamweaver generates is probably the best you can get using WYSIWYG web page builders.

Fireworks is a graphics application almost totally directed to constructing and manipulating imagens for use in web pages. The interface is very simple and intuitive and the tools that are offered give you the power you need.

The integration between the two applications is very simply and well done. This is suite to be used by both the beginner and the intermediate user.

If you wish to construct dynamic webpages using Active Server Pages you should look for Macromedia Ultradev 4 or use Visual Interdev (included in the Visual Studio package).

Rating:
Summary: Stupidly Discontinued!
Review: Get Macromedia Dreamweaver 4. They have turned this once great web design package into a hybrid cross of something that looks like Netscape/Flash and called it Dreamweaver MX 2004.

I used Dreamweaver MX 2004 for a month, uninstalled it and went back to Dreamweaver 4. It really is that terrible and the work space is terribly cluttered making it very hard to work within.

Bottom Line -- Get Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 instead if you can find it. Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 is a very good web design package that knocks Dreamweaver MX 2004 for ten. You will simply hate Dreamweaver MX 2004 when you install it on your system. I nearly barfed after a month of using that *new* completely hostile and non-user friendly piece of unstable and slow excuse for a web design software program.

Get this instead ... if you can find it...

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I strayed away from Macromedia a few years ago after becoming disillusioned with the Director series. After just having had a horrible experience with compatability while using Microsoft web-editing software, I decided to purchase Dreamweaver and see how far the company had come. I am absolutely blown away by the power of this studio - it has singlehandedly replaced about seven different programs I was using, and making sure your content is accessable to all web users is a snap. The design tools are as simple or complex as you want to make them - I prefer to handle layout through the WYSIWYG editor, but I often need to insert custom tags and script. Both methods are simple and intuitive, as if the software always knows exactly what I'm trying to do, and it's helping me along the way. The seamless integration with Flash and Fireworks media (etc.) is a bit of a plug, but it's wonderful if you're other Macromedia products (incidentally, picking up Fireworks along with this is a great idea). Support through the Macromedia webpage and the built-in tutorials - as well as the expandability of the program through extensions - is also excellent, and the FTP and site management is wonderful for someone as disorganized as I am. I can't recommend this product highly enough for any web designer, from the novice to the advanced. Proficient developers that commonly use ASP and Java may want to upgrade to the UltraDev version to avoid too much custom code.

Rating:
Summary: Dreamweaver--My dreams come true!!
Review: I was an everyday/all-day user of Dreamweaver 3, Fireworks 3, Flash 5, and Freehand 9--so when this upgrade of Dreamweaver/Fireworks came out, I was more than thrilled! Before Dreamweaver, as a beginning website builder, I had been coding all my pages using Word Pad and HTML--hey, it's free. With Dreamweaver 4, no more importing HTML files from other programs and cleaning up the code.

Even though I am only webmastering a website about my family--Dreamweaver 4, Fireworks 4, Flash 5 and Freehand 9 have made my site look better than the other personal pages that I encounter on Netscape and Geocities. You can do much without being an HTML pro or web design professional, and the browser preview check is always a hepful feature--I have to worry about IE and Netscape functionality. Fireworks 4 allowed me to create cycling gif banners for my site--with a little Javascript code.

The programs are easy to learn--even if you have never used Dreamweaver or Fireworks (in that case buy the full package not the upgrade)--by just reading the instruction manuals and playing with around the tutorials. I recommend Dreamweaver 3 and 4 over other WYSIWYG editors, especially FrontPage, and for non-Adobe types it's the best out there. I am a non-Adobe type because the software packages are nutty-priced--even with my educational discount the price of the full suite package equals that of a year's tuition study at a small state college.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best WYSIWYG web editors.
Review: Recently, I had a choice between using Dreamweaver 3 and Adobe GoLive 5. When upgrade time came along, Dreamweaver was the one I selected to advance with. UltraDev also gives you the ability to connect your site to a database, invaluable in today's web world.

Dreamweaver is extremely easy to use with very little training. However, the training can be invaluable to helping you utilize every feature that has been packed into this program. Version 4 allows you to build Flash buttons within Dreamweaver. With the addition of Fireworks, you have a complete web studio. Now, all you need is a server.

Rating:
Summary: The absolute be-all and end-all of HTML web design software.
Review: This is it. People who have been using it for years know it, and people who are just discovering it are realizing: Dreamweaver is in a class by itself. Version 4 is the best yet, much better than it needed to be considering there wasn't any competition as it was. From beginning web-designer to experienced coder, this is one POWERFUL program. Combine it with Fireworks 4 (Macromedia's much better version of Adobe's Image Ready) and you haved it all.

Dreamweaver allows you to: -meticulously organize your sites, make master templates for page uniformity, use Cascading Style Sheets to easily customize and format various page elements, the ability to convert the CSS atributes to HTML tags for use in older browsers, update entire sites with one click, view your page in html code view OR wysiwyg OR at the SAME TIME (you can drag open a table let's say and watch the code get written like x-ray vision, OR, conversely, edit the underlying code while watching the effect on your page in front of your eyes), covert tables to layers and back again, edit graphics in Fireworks without having to enter Fireworks and re-export your work (a VERY VERY VERY timesaving feature), insert frames, tables, Flash buttons, rollovers, swap images, and other JavaScript behaviors with a simple "drag and drop".

Dreamweaver will automatically clean up messy HTML (deleting extra font tags for instance) as well as debug JavaScript behaviors. The code that version 4 writes is MUCH cleaner than version 3, and any ...programmsers have TOTAL access to the code to customize it how they see fit. You can preview your work in as many browsers as you have on your computer, and then FTP to your server right from Dreamweaver in the best FTP interface on the market. Dreamweaver automatically keeps track of all updates to any page or graphic and asks you if you would like to update other pages. For sites that will be worked on by a team there are many features to organize the work flow such as "Check In/Check Out" that keeps track of who did what to what part of the site as well as leave comments for other parts of the team. There really are too many features to list here.

Fireworks 4 has a new "button editor" that makes it ridiculously easy to generate rollover buttons or the currently trendy "dropdown menus". I personally don't like them, but they are there to use. Included are a bunch of really useful effects such as bevel and glow. The best part about this program is that vector graphics REMAIN as editable vector graphics EVEN AFTER YOU APPLY EFFECTS. You don't have to permanently convert your graphic to a bitmap first. This alone is worth the whole program. You can also set the program to use all your Photoshop plug-ins (although using SOME of them DO require you to do the evil conversion from editable vector to bitmap). Fireworks also feature "selective" JPEG compression for optimizing certain parts of the SAME image with a different JPEG compression setting (let's say 30% for a background and 70% for a detailed foreground). What other program does that? Fireworks is also THE animated GIF software. You can make them as many frames as you want as well as set the duration of each frame. Overall I think that Fireworks 4 is not as totally developed as Dreamweaver 4 is, but it does what it is supposed to do, and works flawlessly with Dreamweaver.

I can't even tell you how easy they have made it to produce 100% professional sites. The bottom line is: this package is the ABSOLUTE best web development software in existence. There is no equal. And for all you hand-coders who swear by BB-Edit or "anti-WYSIWYG" programs, you CAN entirely hand-code in Dreamweaver too. Just use code view. There is no reason to not use this program. Once you do, you will NEVER use anything else. You'll see.