professional development

I've been a Dreamweaver devotee since version 3. It was the first visual editor I felt comfortable with after doing hand-coding for many years. I thought it was time to give myself a break and just layout pages visually - a process I've become very accustomed to over the past, oh, five years.

I purchased MXStudio 2004 because I wanted to learn Flash and to get a new version of Fireworks - those alone were probably worth my $200. The Mac OS X version of Dreamweaver, however, is absolutely horrific. It's slower than Classic, slower than MX... it's just impossibly slow. In testing, I've found a web page to take 8 seconds from double-clicking it to being able to edit it. Resizing a window takes 2.5 seconds on average. This is all on a fairly quick iMac G4 running at 800MHz, with Mac OS X 10.3.2, the newest version of the operating system, installed.

The new features are nice - pasting in styled text from MS Word is extremely handy when many of your clients use that program (like mine). This is the first Mac OS X-native version of Dreamweaver I've used, so not starting up Classic is a huge benefit.

If Macromedia can figure out where the sluggishness is happening (and actually fix it!) , I'd be a much happier web designer. I just want a quick WYSIWYG web page editor that supports CSS well (Dreamweaver always has); the lack of speed with which this program carries out its tasks is seriously detrimental to my productivity, though. Doing a series of copying and pasting in notes from Word to Dreamweaver is just dog-slow... and it's not because Word is lagging on me.

Wait for an update, then see if things are better.

Edit: an update, 7.0.1, is now available. Macromedia touts it as the biggest incremental update to a program ever. I have to say it really does speed up the process. The program doesn't feel as lithe as shareware Cocoa programs designed for one app, but I doubt it would ever feel quite that good.

Overall, this update easily ups my score 1 star, and more likely, 1 and a half stars. Since we can't rate my half stars, I'm going to go out on a limb and increase my rating from its previous 2 stars to 4, because Macromedia seems to have tried so hard - and really delivered the goods with this update.

I owned Dreamweaver MX, and then bought MX 2004. Overall I'm glad I did, but I could see how some people might not need to upgrade. I mostly like the changes in CSS. It's added some wysiwyg functionally for certain CSS stuff. It does seem slower to load though. I run it on a 1.0GHz Pentium M Tablet PC with 512 MB of RAM and it takes a bit to come up but after it does performance is fine. Then it also takes a while to close. I really enjoy using macromedia though and would DEFINITELY recommend it over Frontpage which I used before I switched a couple years ago.

Also, I noticed some people complained that MX 2004 takes a REALLY long time to load. I might add taht 7.0 was the original version released and then they released an upgrade to version 7.1 for free (that you can get at macromedia.com) and it is supposed to improve "overall performance and stability" according to macromedia, but the version I bought came with v 7.1 so I never experienced 7.0. This could make a difference though.

Upgrade? What upgrade? The older versions were much better than this one. This new version runs very slowly, adds redundant and unneeded tags and crashes more often than Windows 98!
Please just don't buy this product, don't waste your money.