Dreamweaver 8 thoughts

UPDATE:FORGOT SOMETHING REALLY IMPORTANT!
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Well I've used Dreamweaver 8 for a few days and just wanted to post my thoughts about it. First of all the XML,XSLT and CSS support is very very VERY good to have!

Although 90% of my dreamweaver time is with Coldfusion development, it makes it easier for me to build CSS lay-outs in fast and easy way. The style rendering is very useful to test your output for multiple devices such as mobile browsers and stuff. Also code hinting for CSS is fine tuned. For example if you define a border such as:

The code hinting persists after you typed in 1px, which makes is better useable for newbie CSS coders to see what options to fill in, or of course for the tags you don't know yet... The design view with CSS is also improved. You know the table layouts in design view, now CSS is also rendered like that but then even better! DW can give your different div's and span's a different background color to debug your design better. And with the new zoom functionality you can really debug it on pixel level. So for the CSS designers/developers this is a great new version!

For me as a coder I like the code collapse functionality, but it's not perfect yet. Although it's nice to have, a lot of work needs to be done to this. The auto closing is enhanced with something else nice... If you write, for instance, a link. The closing tag of de "a" is written where you write the first two characters of the closing tag. Also when you select a piece of code in code view and do a right-click on it, you can wrap a tag around the selected code... Very useful to be certain that the closing tag is in the right place if you have big files.

Something what is a bit buggy, is the "Automatic wrapping functionality". If you go to "Edit > Preferences > Code Format" and disable the "automatic wrapping", it still wraps your code if it's at the end of your screen. I personally like it that long pieces of text go all the way off screen, but now it automatically breaks a part in multiple lines (with the same line number though). If someone knows how to edit this setting, PLEASE let me know!

The Coldfusion help files are now also in a new container. I preferred the old layout, but that's just a personal preference. Something else that would be nice was different help files for CFMX and CFMX 7, although the help files display the update information of the tags, you really forget to look at it if you're doing CFMX 6.1 development with the help files. Yes I still use the help files every single day and it helps me a lot creating working code in once!

Something else that really helps to improve your workflow is the background FTP functionality. No more screen freezes and coffee moments when uploading files. Just work further and even edit the files that are being uploaded without any problem. Although there is a but that I just found out. When you upload files from Site A, you can't change the workspace to Site B while uploading. Not a real bug, but something by design if you ask me. Although I would love to see the ability to switch from site even when uploading files.

So that's it for now. I still need to update a application that is waiting for a long time and it needs to be done YESTERDAY if you know what I mean. So maybe more about the Studio programs soon after the application update...