Adobe could have rested on its laurels when updating Dreamweaver to its latest incarnation in the subscription-based Creative Cloud service as Dreamweaver CC. In its previous incarnation as Dreamweaver CS6, part of Adobe's Creative Suite 6, Adobe's advanced website editor already had little or no serious competition as a tool for creating and maintaining today's multiplatform websites. Dreamweaver CS6, for example, introduced ready-to-use "fluid grid" Web layouts that use CSS to reshape webpages automatically according to the screen size, making it easy to build a single site use with phones, tablets, and desktops without the complex CSS hand-coding previously required.
The new Dreamweaver CC enhances the fluid-grid feature by supporting HTML5 structural elements such as Sections and Articles. It also adds an equally effort-saving tool, a new CSS Designer that uses an interactive graphic interface for modifying CSS properties like shadows and curved corners, so you only need to click and drag to modify complex CSS code while seeing the results in real-time. Full support for Web-based fonts?downloaded from Adobe's servers while the browser loads a page?makes it easy to create eye-catching designs. Also, like the rest of the Creative Cloud suite, Dreamweaver also gets a simplified and more easily customizable interface, and works identically under both Windows and OS X.
Pro and Semi-Pro
Dreamweaver is a professional-level tool that's worth having?if you can afford it?even if you're a non-professional. First-time Dreamweaver users may be intimidated by the multitude of menus and property panels in the default layout, but it soon becomes clear how to use these to get quick access to advanced controls over CSS elements, or to switch quickly between displays that show how a webpage will look when printed or when displayed on different size screens. Advanced Web designers can click on a menu of JavaScript-based UI widgets into their code to create pop-up dialogs, date-pickers, accordion-style menus, and everything else in the current repertory of UI effects. But even less-advanced users can create flexible HTML5-compliant sites that look good on any platform.
Start Weaving Dreams
Starting from either a blank page or sample layout, you click on items in an Insert panel to add elements like templates (with editable and uneditable regions), multimedia (HTML5 or Flash), and standard HTML features. The default screen is split into a code pane and a WYSIWYG design pane, but you can choose one or the other, or make the design pane "Live" to view media content like video, or content that will be served up from a database when the page appears in a browser. One thing I admire about Dreamweaver is that it doesn't favor Adobe's proprietary technologies like Flash over open standards like HTML5 video, but gives equal support for both?and even provides a better-looking and more usable HTML5 video player than its built-in Flash player.
When you build a page with Dreamweaver's fluid grid feature, the app first creates a page that contains a grid of vertical columns that are visible in Dreamweaver but not when the page appears in a browser. By default, a page designed for phones fits into four of these invisible columns. When the same page is displayed on a tablet, it fills eight columns, and twelve columns when displayed on a desktop machine.
When you switch between screen sizes in Dreamweaver's editing window, the content of your site rearranges itself to fit the width that you specified for the specific type of screen, and you can use the CSS Designer panel to adjust the shape, size, and other properties of individual elements to suit the different screen sizes.
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/4bSyIbqqINQ/0,2817,2421105,00.asp
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