Dreamweaver 4.0/Fireworks 4.0 Studio

Macromedia's Dreamweaver 4 packs layer upon layer of powerful features, for just about any Web developer's needs and preferences. Perfect for individuals and professional Web-development teams alike, this latest version offers a fresh set of upgrades and improvements. Programmers who build sites by using only a basic text editor are rewarded with features for source-code inspection. Code View's text-editing environment offers such customizable features as live syntax coloring, tag balancing, and auto indenting. Noncoding types can click and drag sites together by using one of the finer visual editors available. Within those layers of features, there are resources for creating forms, Flash files, frames, cascading style sheets, Java and ActiveX files, and more. In Split View, the Code and Design views display simultaneously--providing the best of both worlds for ambidextrous types.

The quickest and easiest way to design graphics in the Dreamweaver world is via Fireworks 4. Fireworks' strengths lie in its focus on the creation and optimization of bitmapped and vector Web graphics. The files are integrated into Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver easily, and importing/exporting Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator files is a breeze; especially with the program's improved layer mask handling, and a new Color Fill Live effect. Version 4 rolls out a new interface that Flash, Dreamweaver, and FreeHand users will recognize. This standardized format also offers tabbed menus for easy customization, and helps keep the screen tidy. New tools for adding interactive elements--rollovers, navigation bars, and pop-up menus--are a welcome sight. And a Live Animation feature creates frame-based GIF animations, using symbols, instances, and tweening features that are familiar to Flash users. With built-in HTML and JavaScript capabilities, version 4 delivers the goods to the Web graphics design community.

Convinced? If not, you can always buy Dreamweaver 4 at full retail, and then follow-up with a Fireworks 4 purchase, weeks or months later. Just don't blame us for the lingering red mark from your forehead slap. --Eric Twelker--This review refers to the Windows version.

Amazon.com Product Description
Get integrated Web graphics design and professional Web-site development by using these two bundled products. A shared Macromedia user interface and integrated product features make the Dreamweaver 4 Fireworks 4 Studio the most efficient way to create professional Web sites. Create, edit, and animate bitmap and vector Web graphics, and add advanced interactivity and pop-up menus in Fireworks' robust, professional environment. Easily import Fireworks rollovers, pop-up menus, and buttons into Dreamweaver to create engaging Web experiences. Launch and edit both graphics and tables between Dreamweaver and Fireworks for efficient workflow. In Dreamweaver, complete the design by using visual page-layout techniques or code entirely by hand in the professional text-editing environment. Create Macromedia Flash graphics, easily manage site assets, and integrate content from Microsoft Office to create professional Web sites. Look up code descriptions and examples by using integrated reference material from O'Reilly Publications. Maximize team efficiency and integrate seamlessly with leading content-management systems.

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.


The absolute be-all and end-all of HTML web design software.   November 6, 2001
M. Pincus (East Meadow, NY USA)
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.


The absolute be-all and end-all of HTML web design software.   November 6, 2001
M. Pincus (East Meadow, NY USA)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful

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.


Macromedia dreamweaver 4.0(a complete web designing kit)   May 3, 2001
vivek (Jabalpur, M.P.,India)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful

Nowadays as there are so many web-editing tools like adobegoalive, coffee cup, Microsoft FrontPage, the market of software's is cluttered with numerous web-editing tools. Dreamweaver 4.0 provides many good improvements over 3.0 .One very handy feature is that now we can see the html coding and design in one window. Although the existence of these tools the tool mostly preferred by the most of the web designers is macromedia deamweaver. With its easy to use interface and exquisite help and tutorials the amateurs found it very helpful in learning. The new features in it sets it apart of the other software's. These features include enhance HTML editing; improve site management that let you add elements such as special characters, navigation bars, and image maps; streamline your workflow; and allow you to customize and extend Dreamweaver. The best feature of the software is that is does not require any knowledge of html. The html is automatically created at the backend as one proceeds with the design. The numerous palettes in dreamweaver help the new user in designing. These palettes Provide a collection of commonly used special characters and symbols such as , , and that are easily accessible from the Object palette. One can easily create forms, css styles, and java scripts and define various behaviors. Working with these palettes is much easier as compared to the other software's available like Microsoft FrontPage in which one has to select the different features from the menu as it saves a lot of time of the designer and everything that he needs is in front of him in form of palettes. If the designer makes some serious blunder amidst of design it is very easy for him to rectify the mistake by using the history palette. The feature that makes the software distinct is its ability to create templates. After the basic layout of the page is designed there is no need for the designer to recreate the same for different pages the layout can be saved as template and then new pages can then be created using these templates. I am new to this software but since I started using it found it very interesting. To me it is the best that a designer can get. Although a bit expensive it is worth the cost