The Dreamweaver team has been hard at work since the launch of CS3 to bring you…drum roll please…CS4!

That’s right! A bright and shiny new version is available as a public beta. Also available are the Bridge CS4, Fireworks CS4, and Soundbooth betas.

The biggest changes are in the interface.  The OWL interface that you’ve come to know and love in Photoshop are now in Dreamweaver, as are a host of other refinements and improvements.  My favorite UI enhancements by far are the Vertical Split View and Split Code View–the combination of which finally lets you work on the header and body of a document at the same time the way God intended. After all, why would she give us wide-screen monitors if she didn’t want us to see two pages side by side?

Also notable in the new Dreamweaver CS4 are the following:

• Javascript Extractor - provides an easy to make your JavaScript unobtrusive by externalizing it and tying it to watcher events.  This is very cool.  (Note: Read all about Unobtrusive JavaScript in this post.)
• Integrated Subversion Client - ties an SVN client into the site functionality.
• Related Documents - provides instant access to any file that is immediately linked from the document you’re working in
• New Spry Validation & Widgets - new and improved are the Spry validation widgets for passwords and radio groups, along with integrated support for the latest version of Spry.

Click the links below to get your copy hot off the digital presses:

• The Adobe Labs Dreanweaver Beta home

Please direct any feedback, bug reports, and feature requests to the Dreamweaver Public Beta Forums.

I was kindly informed by Microtek that I’m screwed. My s400 flatbed scanner that is barely more than a year old has been bricked since my October upgrade to Leopard. I’ve been patient for months now, and finally wrote them a kind letter. I got this in response:

Dear Mr. Stringer,Please be advised that the ScanMaker s400 scanner is not supported on Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. We regret to inform you that Microtek will not be releasing software drivers for the ScanMaker s400 scanner to support this new operating system. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you.

<rant>

Microtek just made my infamous Dead-to-Me list with Sony, the Microsoft Operating System, and the Republican Party. Congratulations guys. I’ve got your prize right >here<.

Look for an mint s400 on eBay soon.

</rant>

Update:
The item is up for sale on ebay. Check it out here.

A client asked me the other day what web standards were and why I seemed to hate Internet Explorer so much.

My response was thusly given:

Web standards are an agreed upon set of rules. Like, we all agree that a square is a square and a circle is a circle.

Microsoft, on the other hand, tells us that we, the entire internet development community, do not know what the hell we’re talking about. A square is clearly NOT a square (not to be confused with a squircle). It is, instead, roughly defined a polygonally rendered object oriented box-like ActiveWidget that may or may not have four equal sides (except when rendered in quirks mode). For our own damn good they’ve unilaterally embraced and extended the standard (now called ActiveCube 2008 Professional Edition) to include a fifth side on certain occasions.

And at the end of the day, they’re still not going to draw the damn box on the screen, so we can all go fuck ourselves.

I don’t even know what to make of this.  I came across it on the Japanese language blog optica optima where you can find the tasty and delicious dock drawers icons for Leopard’s Stacks.  In typical Japanese fashion, it’s completely incomprehensible to a gaijin like me and makes ample use of young school girls. So light one up, sit back, and watch the show.

A very odd thing happened to me today. I was in the Apple store buying an iPod touch for myself when not one but two men trying to buy “a couple of iPhones” were told about a brand new Apple Store policy, effective as of 10am today (10/25/07), that stated that customers wanting to buy two or more iPhones must pay by credit card.

What made this odd besides the fact that Apple felt the need to institute this policy was the reaction the guys had when informed of the policy. They flipped out and walked out after berating the manager. Later, I encountered both jabbering on their cell phones out in the mall. Clearly, some business model was being disrupted.

Now, a two things are odd about this:

1. Why the heck is Apple so keen to put the kibosh on people reselling the iPhone? Money’s money, right? Now, I can understand them objecting to a guy unloading an iPhone or two that just happened to “fall off the back of the truck,” but these guys were paying full retail plus tax. Who cares if they eBay them?
2. Speaking of which, who the hell were these guys reselling the phone to? Again, they were paying full retail plus tax, which implies that somewhere down the line, some poor sucker is willing to pay more than that. So I ask again, who the hell is this poor sucker.

Anyway, this was odd. If you have insight into this, I’d love to hear it in the comments below.

I have an Automator script (available here) that pulls down the large version of NASA’s astronomy picture of the day (APOD) for use in my screen saver. Totally geeky, I know.

Most days, the images are your average star field or Hubble image, but every now and then, they throw up an image that just takes your breath away. Today’s is such an image.

Script Details

The script is simple, really. It logs into the site, “clicks” on the image to get the larger version, and saves it to a folder on your system.

1. Save the script
2. Open the workflow
3. Specify where you want the script to save the downloaded image
4. Save it as an Application
5. In iCal, set an alarm to go off and make that alarm open the Application you just saved in #4
6. In System Preferences, open Desktops & Screen Savers
7. Point the Screen Saver to the folder you specified in #3.
8. Sit back and enjoy your computer’s idle time.

In September, 2006, Adobe acquired InterAKT, a small company that wrote extensions for Dreamweaver and Flex. Among these extensions was the Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox, an extensive set of class-driven wizards that added sorely needed features to Dreamweaver such as advanced form creation and query builders that all worked within the Dreamweaver framework.

A free 30-day trial of the Toolkit is available here.

At $299, Adobe is asking a lot for these tools. As a point of reference, Dreamweaver itself is $399 at full retail. Does the Toolbox deliver 3/4 of the functionality of its parent app? Not even close. Adobe has tried to address many of the deficiencies in Dreamweaver with this Toolbox, but I believe strongly that these features should be addressed as part of an already expensive app, not as a $299 add-on.

Setting my philosophical problems with Adobe’s pricing decision aside, I have spent the past two weeks playing with them and evaluating their applicability to my development environment. In short, it’s a no-go. My strong recommendation is to save your money.

This recommendation is based on several factors, some of which are specific to my development environment, and some of which I believe will be commonly experienced by all developers.

To understand where the Toolbox is fatally flawed, it is worth exploring what, exactly, the Toolbox does. The Toolbox is actually a set of Server Behaviors that extend the set of canned behaviors included in DW. For instance, the toolbox offers a handy way to create an advanced set of registration features, complete with confirmation emails, etc. These are all wizard driven and derive their functionality from a set of classes and function libraries that are included as a set of files automatically by DW.

Therein lies the fatal flaw. Like Dreamweaver, the Toolbox assumes that your local root folder specified in your Site settings is actually the public web root. Internal links to the libraries are relative and extensive and automated, meaning you can’t simply move the included files to your public web root without breaking all of the canned functionality.

To make matters worse, the wizard-driven interface was, in my experience, fatally buggy and inconsistent. More times than not, the Toolkit could not make a connection to my database giving me the infamous “Testing Database Connection” dialog. Apparently, the Toolkit caches some value somewhere deep within its Wizard’s bowels and won’t let go. I could find no rhyme or reason for this problem, but it persisted and happened in enough Wizards and situations that it made me believe that this was a global problem, not an isolated issue.

It’s a shame. There’s so much potential there. InterAKT valiantly tried to address Dreamweaver’s shortcomings with an extensive set of behaviors. Some were truly useful and I could see myself using them. But in the end, there is no way I am paying $299 Adobe for a buggy, semi-functional set of server behaviors. Being the eternal optimist, perhaps they’ll fix these problems and integrate the Toolkit directly into Dreamweaver next go-round. We’ll see.

Related stories:

• Review: Dreamweaver CS3: What a Disappointment
• An Open Letter to Adobe

If you recently switched to the Mac platform, as many people have, and planned to buy the Upgrade version of CS3, read the fine print. According to Adobe:

Upgrade pricing is available only for products listed above and requires a qualifying previous product on the same platform, with serial number. Upgrades for volume and education licensing are handled separately.

Also, if you read their Upgrade FAQ [link], they say:

Q: Can I upgrade from one platform to another for Macromedia Design and Development products? For example, if I own Dreamweaver for Windows now, can I switch to Dreamweaver for Macintosh when I upgrade?
A. No. You must purchase your upgrade product on the same platform as the eligible product that you now own.

This means that if you had planned to cross-grade your PC version of CS, you won’t be able to.

At least, not at retail and not without calling Adobe at 800-833-6687 and requesting a cross-grade.

The process took over an hour, but at the end of it, I was able to do a cross-grade for the same price as an upgrade (with the exception that Adobe charges tax in Texas, whereas Amazon does not). It takes 3-5 business days to process the cross-grade after faxing in an ominously named document called a “Letter of Software Destruction.”

It is unbelievable to me how difficult cross-grading turned out to be, especially given the number of people who have moved to Mac since the Intel switch. But kudos to Adobe for two things: 1) their customer service wasn’t outsourced to India, and 2) the person whom I spoke to was extremely nice.

Quote source: Adobe Store [link]