Product: Macromedia DreamWeaver 3.01 & FireWorks 3.0 STUDIO
Company: Macromedia Corp.
Website: http://www.macromedia.com
Estimated Street Price: $379.95
Review By: Julien JAY

DreamWeaver Advanced Features

DreamWeaver can now import HTML documents from Microsoft Office software and clean them from unused HTML code due to its RoundTrip Technology. To the old good support of CSS styles, DreamWeaver adds the support of the HTML styles that are compatible with every web browsers. These HTML styles include legend style, copyright style and much more! The brand new revamped quick tag editor will give you instant access to the HTML code you need to review. As DreamWeaver is an opening web developing working environment, developers can extend it by using JavaScript or DOM (document object model). At the use DreamWeaver revealed itself as an excellent product even if we noticed these inconveniences: adding cells to existing tabs isn't always easy and the paste from a Microsoft Office 2000 software doesn't respect at all the format of the native text. Too bad. Note that the DreamWeaver site manager can synchronize local websites with distant one with just a mouse click. It's really a great and appreciable feature. In the same manner the Site Manager of DreamWeaver automatically update links when you change for example the name of a picture file or of a webpage name. DreamWeaver is now Java enabled and every JAVA developer can customize DreamWeaver using its JAVA API to adapt it to its working manner: that is to say that the JavaScript authoring environment allows you to automate complex and painful tasks. The integration with other macromedia tools is now at its top, as we wrote before, as the same objects palette offers shortcuts to add Flash, FireWorks, Generator, ShockWave objects. DreamWeaver 3 also offers convenience features to add for example the date to your webpage in the format you want by simply choosing it in the list. Macromedia has hopefully thought to all this young webmasters in sneakers' as DreamWeaver hopefully includes a spellchecker that'll ensure the pages to be proofread, phew!!! But more exceptional is the fact that you can draw layouts in DreamWeaver as if you were working under PhotoShop to easily create marvelous webpages. Finally DreamWeaver 3 obviously supports navigating bars like in FrontPage 2000 in order to automatically create buttons to access all the pages of your current website.

Macros, Photos,... So complete software it is!

For those of you that are not JAVA pros, Macromedia has included a small macro recorder that can be easily used to record a suit of tasks in DreamWeaver in order to reuse it later. But that's not all MacroMedia provides users with a photos album generator that'll automatically generate a library with all the photos contained on a specific folder. It's an amazing feature that everyone will appreciate!