Longing for a break

As a web designer/developer I always have open my favourite Adobe applications, Photoshop and Dreamweaver.  When Adobe released the CS3 suite I couldn’t jump in quickly enough, the integration between Dreamweaver and Photoshop made for some serious productivity improvements, not to mention using Adobe’s Spry Framework for Ajax to construct menu systems, tabs and the like.

Last week Adobe released a beta version of three of their upcoming CS4 apps and I chose to download Dreamweaver CS4 to check out what had changed.  Visually Dreamweaver’s interface takes on more of an Adobe look with the collapsible panels introduced in CS3, plus some other visual changes which look nice enough.  I was quite disappointed I must say in that Spry wasn’t improved within this release, I was hoping that Adobe might take its integration further and make it easier to apply settings to things like tabs/panels/accordions etc, and perhaps integrate additional Spry widgets.  Not from what I saw.

The one feature I did quite like was their integration of a web browser into Dreamweaver within their live view, this feature using a webkit based browser.  It would have been nice to be able to switch your live browser to use IE, Mozilla or Webkit based browsers eliminating the need to preview externally, even better perhaps having a tabbed interface (live preview tabs) which allow us to quickly see each rendering engine’s preview, this is however a step in the right direction and a minor productivity improvement for designer/developers.

I honestly didn’t spend enough time with the preview, already it has expired as Adobe wouldn’t accept my CS3 key, perhaps because it’s a site license key for CS3, thus only a 48 hour preview.  Good thing is that I ran it inside Virtual PC!!

Within Photoshop CS4 I really hope they make some changes to the way masks work with smart objects, no matter what I do I cannot get the mask to move as I move the layer, it’s impossible to lock the two.