IDEs — Dreamweaver CS4 and Expression Web 2 May 30, 2008
The beta version of Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS4 was released recently and the release of Microsoft’s Expression Web 2 was not so long ago either.
I have tried both and I like Microsoft’s creation more.
When I first started making websites for fun I used now-extinct Microsoft FrontPage. I only used it as a WYSIWYG editor.
A lot of time passed since and we used then-Macromedia’s Dreamweaver MX 2004 at college. And I have been using it (newer versions though) since then.
Therefore I decided to try out the new, CS4 version. And I did not like it. Because Dreamweaver hasn’t changed much since version 8.
Yes, CS4’s interface is fancier and modern-dark and it offers different layouts for coders and designers. It is good, but this addition is not significant enough to make me migrate to the newer version.
Yes, there’s more interaction between HTML and CSS — you can, for instance, alt-click a tag and it will show the applied CSS styles. And you can click the style and it will open in the next window — convenient.
Then there’s much-advertised Live View which is said to be using WebKit as the rendering engine. I am not sure about it though — it renders pages like.no.other™. I mean, not like Safari (which also uses WebKit), Firefox or Internet Explorer. And I am used to open a real browser and test under it. That’s why this feature is completely useless for me.
The worst thing is its sluggishness. It is so-o-o sluggish, you won’t believe. The install or uninstall took more than 15 minutes for me. And deleting a line of code make the Windows show a hourglass cursor — which means you have to wait, even if it is for only a second or two. It takes a lot of time to start compared to version 8.
Tested it for a day and uninstalled.
The next turn was Microsoft’s Expression Web 2. It is not FrontPage anymore. Also has a dark interface (which you can change it in the options). You can also alt-click on a tag’s class and it will automatically open the CSS file and highlight the corresponding code. There’s a list of all the HTML tags used in CSS and clicking will highlight the code. Convenient. And not so sluggish as Dreamweaver CS4.
There are some cons of this program — it weighs much and it is integrated with the 2007 Office family (I am telling that because it uses some interface elements of Office 2007 and I couldn’t install it while I had my MSOcache folder remover (In case you don’t know — Office 2007 keeps it’s installation files there). So, I had to reinstall my whole Office in order to install Expression Web 2.)
But still — it is quite fast and more convenient than CS4.
PS. Damn, Expression Web 2 doesn’t have at least one feature that Dreamweaver has — it doesn’t show a list of special characters when you type an ampersand…
Well, well. Finally someone else with enough guts to try and compare the biggies. Here’s my cross-border critique.
Actually, CS$ and EW2 are both in the same swamp, but anyway, here goes.
CS4 Dreamweaver is art-intelligent, meaning it hiotches creative effort with intuitive CS4 package inclusions. The equivalent in EW2 would be say, a popup spreadsheet when you go to morph your sencond illustration on the sdame page – lol. However CS4 has another cool event, which is display of CSS threading in a document. Not to worry, all you spreadsheet poopers! Just dl the free Safari for Windows, add Safari to your EW browser list, and preview yourt page in Safari – using right-click you can get enough CSS threading information to fill a dozen spreadsheets!
EW2 is not sluggish at all. If you are code-saavy, or try to be, you will really enjoy warping your creative processes through code, split and design views. Cool thing is, you can forget Microsoft’s anally retentive indulgence of bitmaps and gifs and option png and jpg – better still you can set your own high standards for image quality in your fav graphic editor and …OOOPS! Seems EW2 has a little poblem with understanding that designers have unique abilities when working screen outputs. EW2 Beta simply crashed trying to save a reset image. Final release also throws in that damn NET 3.0 crutch as a seperate and uncoordinated necessary install.
Both CS4 and EW2 do not understand teh meaning of the word accessible. For me it means this, you have people who are, say, half blind. They want a product that assists their visual facility. They also want a product that integrates standard equipment used by blind people, including things like, say, automatic cross platform aditory plugins. Dah. Even a few basics? Please!
Thing with EW2 is you are not really looking for support from Microsoft. Turns out your manufacture is gifted by a bunch of Mac-Linux-Windows misfits who manage customer complaints and requests like an A-type recipient handles B-type and C-type blood transfussions: not too well. I should probably close with something equally detracting for Adobe, but …ah well, got to go! It’s a crazy world, if you think it out carefully. It ALL crazy.
Comment by Mark Stewart — June 18, 2008 @ 11:50
Comment by Mark Stewart — June 18, 2008 @ 11:50 <<< talk about biased
Comment by Cannon — November 20, 2008 @ 19:45