One drawback to the OWL interface, especially for Mac users, is that it really wants to take up your entire screen. Click on the image to see a larger version. Clicking a panel icon causes the panel to fly out and appear. If you need more screen real estate, you can collapse the panels to icons. Dreamweaver comes with several workspaces optimized for designers, coders, and application developers.įigure 2. You can arrange panels however you like, and you can save your workspace so it’s always available to you. Clicking on the panel icon causes the panel to fly out so you can use it (Figure 2). You can pull panels out of the panel dock to become free-floating windows, or you can collapse the panels to icons for more document space. The Dreamweaver interface, like all of the programs in the CS4 suite, has become more panel-oriented, banishing the old Insert Bar to the panel dock on the right side of the screen, where it becomes the Insert panel. Dreamweaver now uses OWL, the cross-platform OS Widget Library meant to unify the user experience across all the Adobe applications (Figure 1).įigure 1. The first thing you’ll notice when you open the program is the tweaked user interface. Windows installation took much less time because there was so much less to install. Installation on the Mac took a long time (almost an hour), as is now familiar when installing an Adobe suite. I installed Dreamweaver CS4 as part of the CS4 Master Collection package on Macintosh and as a standalone program on Windows. On the Mac, you’ll also require a PowerPC G5 or Intel-based Macintosh.
To run Dreamweaver CS4, you’ll need Windows XP SP2 or Vista, or Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later. Add tighter integration with Photoshop for creating Web graphics, and this is an upgrade worth paying for. Whether you’re a designer or a Web programmer, Dreamweaver CS4 makes it easier to work with today’s sites, split up as they are between HTML, CSS, and script files. This version successfully continues Dreamweaver’s movement toward building properly structured, standards-compliant Web sites. In the tenth major version of any professional application, most of the basics are already taken care of. Pros: Better features for working with CSS improved Photoshop integration new Live View and Live Code more accurately render web pages within Dreamweaver.Ĭons: For Mac users, new interface takes over your screen, and requires some retraining for all longtime users.