Dreamweaver slows me down too

This blog is great. Tons of people expressing the same thing I’ve been feeling lately… Dreamweaver is just slow.

I recently switched from Dreamweaver CS3 on Windows (running under Bootcamp on a Macbook Pro) to Dreamweaver CS4 running under Snow Leopard. I also upgraded from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. Dreamweaver CS4 is almost unusable in Design mode, on longer documents. Maybe I have to run disk utility or something, but sheesh.

I’ve enjoyed using Dreamweaver for many years, but why is it that as computers get faster and faster, Adobe software gets slower and slower?

As I’ve pointed out before, Adobe makes some of the most expensive software out there. Why doesn’t it work better?

Adobe Pushes Flash, PDF to US Government

The article about the security vulnerabilities of Adobe Shockwave on Slashdot also posted this, linking to an Ars Technica post about how Adobe is peddling Flash & PDF technology to Uncle Sam. Trouble is, what if you don’t want to install Flash or Acrobat Reader?

Do you really want to be forced to install Adobe software on your computer in order to access certain government forms and information?

What if you’re blind, or still use DOS? What if you wanted to access a government form on your phone? Please government, use open standards like Text, XML, XHTML & CSS for various devices, screen readers and easy & fast searchability.

I admit that I’ve used many interactive forms in the PDF format, always to send the mercenaries more of my hard-earned money.

So my plea is this: Washington, please! Stop making us all fill out so many damn forms and stick to open, accessible standards, please!

Snap To Grid is Broken in Illustrator and always has been

I was just reminded of one of the reasons why I hate Adobe. Aside from the fact that they abandoned the great tools from Macromedia including Freehand and Director, even their flagship vector editor, Illustrator, can be extremely frustrating… when it comes to their woefully broken Snap-To-Grid feature.

At least one other blogger feels the same. I just commented on his blog post about terrible snap to grid performance.

In a nutshell, it seems perfectly logical. Adobe owns Illustrator, Flash and Photoshop, and these are probably their top 3 sellers, so you’d assume these tools would work well together. Think again. Broken! You create a 1-pixel grid in Illustrator, turn on snap-to-grid and expect everything to just work. Well, it doesn’t.

Here’s a list of things that just plain don’t work:

1. You create an object using drawing tools. It’s all snapped to grid perfectly. You can then edit points and drag them off the grid.
2. You grab a handle with the Free Transform tool. Sometimes it will snap to grid, other times it won’t.
3. You make a symbol out of an object that is all snapped to the grid, and drag another instance onto the page. Sometimes it snaps, sometimes it doesn’t.
4. You edit a symbol in context. If it was snapped, sometimes just clicking into the symbol to edit it unsnaps the object points.
5. You edit a symbol in context to snap the edges and points to the grid and escape the symbol. The symbol is now unsnapped.
6. You have an object that is snapped to a 1px grid, copy and paste it to Photoshop. Your line edges are now antialiased. They shouldn’t be - a 1px wide piece of vector art in Illustrator becomes a fuzzy blob when pasted.
7. As Steve pointed out on his post, You type in values for widths or heights of objects that should be on the grid. Save, close and reopen your document and you’ll see that Illustrator added minute amounts of measurements to your object. Presumably these are rounding errors? It’s unclear.
8. You click the pen tool and assume that when you click to draw a path, all points will always be on the grid. They almost never are.

There’s probably several more examples. Basically snap-to-grid is useless. Come on Adobe - get your act together.

Dreamweaver CS4 Subversion Integration

I’ve been developing websites and online applications for over 10 years, but I’ve only been using Subversion for about 3 years within my web development projects. Although it may seem like an added inconvenience, especially for small websites, from my experience, making the commitment to learn to use a source code repository and version control system as a part of your normal development routine can be one of the smartest decisions you’ll ever make. Even if you have the best anti-virus software, a good back-up software, and back up your hard drive frequently, having your actual code and websites backed up and versioned, particularly on a different system than your workstation, can be a huge benefit for several reasons.

First, you can look back over time and see exactly what you did at a glance. Second, if your project scales quickly, or you run out of time to finish on deadline and need to hire some programming help, having your work in a repository makes it a thousand times easier for multiple programmers to work on the same code without collisions — accidentally overwriting each other’s work. Third, if catastrophe does strike, you can be back up and running much more quickly.

I use Dreamweaver as my main IDE. On Windows, I’ve been using Tortoise, the graphical interface to Subversion repositories, along with Araxis Merge for comparing source code. On Mac OS X I use Dreamweaver, Terminal, svn-X, and the SCPlugin.

So I have a fair amount of Subversion experience on both Mac and Windows. I was excited to learn about Dreamweaver CS4 having built in Subversion integration, because I figured I’d be able to save a step or two having Subversion repository support included natively within Dreaweaver CS4.

So I set about setting up a repository and entered the information into Dreaweaver’s Site Manager dialog box. It was as simple as placing the right information in the Subversion server settings dialog box.

I checked out the head, made a few changes and started poking around. Well, to my disappointment, I have to say nice try, Adobe, but not worth the time. What a bummer.

This article on Adobe’s website proclaims that the Subversion features of Dreamweaver CS4

will have a proufound impact on developers?

Hardly! The feature is crippled. You’re much better off using Tortoise.

You can’t do svn log. You can’t do diff (without Araxis merge or another diff merge tool outside of Dreamweaver.) You can’t do so many things… as compared with Terminal or even Tortoise, it was a big let down.

Dreaweaver CS4 does keep track of new, modified and deleted files with ease. You don’t even need to explicitly tell Dreamweaver to add files to the repository — all files are added by default (in many cases, that can work against you). I couldn’t find a way to put in any svn:ignore properties, so having to click on and not commit _notes folders with dwsync.xml data is a giant waste of time and a deal breaker for me. I guess it doesn’t hurt having _notes/dwsync.xml in every folder in my repository, but it’s just unfortuate that some of the basic features are left out.

Oh well, thankfully I never uninstalled Tortoise.

Which brings up one final annoyance — a Dreamweaver working copy is not modifiable by Tortoise and if you checked out with Tortoise, you can’t commit with Dreaweaver.