Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 [OLD VERSION]
- The ideal solution for quickly and easily designing, developing, and maintaining websites using both a visual design interface and a streamlined coding environment
- Create CSS-based web pages with comprehensive tools, including the CSS panel, layout visualization, the Style Rendering toolbar, Browser Compatibility Check, and prebuilt CSS layouts
- Build and maintain web applications using the latest development technologies, including Ajax, PHP, and Adobe ColdFusion
- Incorporate Adobe Flash Video into websites and applications with five clicks of a mouse
- Integrate XML data using a drag-and-drop workflow
Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Windows. Does NOT include full printed User Guide in the box; Fulfillment will include: 30-50 page Getting Started Guide in the box; A PDF of the unabridged User Guide on the CD/DVD; Generic doc fulfillment card outlining policy and our commitment to the environment in the box 2; Online help (both on web and on the desktop) which includes readily accessible training beyond what manuals include. Full printed User Guides will be available at adobe.comDesign, develop
List Price: $ 399.00
Price: $ 999.25
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Dreamweaver 8 Now Comes in a CS3 Box,
I strongly suggest DW8 users download the free DWCS3 demo from Adobe and see what you think–before you buy. Three stars because it’s good old Dreamweaver, but two taken away because it’s not an improvement.
There are some new toys to play with, but the old dog is still sick. Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 should be called “Macromedia Dreamweaver 8.5 Ajax.” The new CS3 interface is not part of Dreamweaver, and it seems nothing at all was done to fix the existing problems or improve the core application. I’m about a week solid into using DWCS3, and for all intents and purposes, this is Dreamweaver 8. Calling it “CS3” is marketing and nothing more. The code has the same bugs, the program still locks up or crashes occasionally, and the FTP is every bit as slow and error prone as before.
There are a few integration tweaks to allow use with the CS3 suite, but they’re not much more than menu options to open other Adobe apps. Opening the Adobe apps independently in CS2 and Studio 8 was the same as using them “from within” Dreamweaver CS3. The Ajax Spry tools are going to be a great thing for the advanced users, and the CSS tools are better than before, but plugins and third party apps do a lot of these things better. The “advanced” Photoshop integration is little more than improved cut & paste operations, and it crashed DW on me twice.
I think it’s somewhat dishonest to charge DW8 users full upgrade price to get DWCS3. Dreamweaver is a good program, but it’s still broken and it needs fixing. I’m assuming Adobe wasn’t ready to go to market with Dreamweaver, but it was time for CS3 in the Adobe life cycle. If they had put GoLive in the same box with Flash and not included Dreamweaver the fans would have rioted, so they spat this thing out prematurely to finish the set. As a full version upgrade this is a supreme disappointment.
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|Not much improvement over DW8,
CS3 adds the Spry AJAX tools and a some new pre-built CSS layout templates, but in reality, similar javascript and CSS code can easily be found for free with a simple Google search. Beyond that, there really isn’t much else in terms of new features over the previous Dreamweaver 8. Also, I dare say it has introduced several bugs, or maybe they are just annoying new “features”.
For example, when you open up a site, half the time the entire root folder is collapsed, forcing you to have to re-open it each time. There seems to be no pattern to this behavior, sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. Also, the root folder has this weird habit of disappearing under the local files bar after a few seconds. So if I open a site and don’t un-collapse the root folder within 2 seconds, then entire thing disappears under the bar, forcing me to hit the site refresh button to get it back. VERY ANNOYING!!!!
Another thing that bothers me is the copy/paste from Word. I get a lot of documents sent to me in Word that I need to convert to HTML. DW8 did a pretty decent job of converting Word to HTML, but CS3 seems to get a lot more wrong; I actually have to do significantly more “clean up” work now when I do a cut/paste from Word, it is especially bad when it comes to converting lists when compared to DW8.
Even if the bugs were addressed in a patch, I think that overall, this is a very disappointing “upgrade”, there really isn’t anything compelling enough to justify moving from DW8. I would give this 5-stars if it was an upgrade from Dreamweaver MX, but as an upgrade from Dreamweaver 8, it’s simply not worth your time.
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|I love it! Sweet!,
I previously used version 4 of Dreamweaver. I only used it on a basic level because I never really studied how to use its features. Then I got Dreamweaver CS3. The first time I launched it, it looked very bizarre and perplexing. Then I got Garrick Chow’s “Dreamweaver CS3 Essentials” video tutorial from lynda.com. I highly recommend it! It makes it so much easier and fun to see demonstrated how to use the features. I also recommend following along doing the exercises on your own copy of Dreamweaver CS3 while you watch him do them. I love Dreamweaver CS3. It has so many features that makes things so much easier. I recently had to create some new web pages based on someone else’s existing web site and its several long, complicated style sheets. Dreamweaver made it easy to track down all the style rules that various tags were using. I would’ve been lost without that feature. And Dreamweaver has so many other helpful, powerful features. OK it’s not perfect, especially the WYSIWYG design screen part of it, but I would NOT want to create web pages without it! It has saved me SO much time! I really don’t care if it’s not much different from version 8 because I never used that version anyway. So I don’t think that’s a valid criticism to make. If you have version 8, then just don’t buy CS3! CS3 is definitely radically different and far superior to the version 4 I was using. I haven’t noticed much in the way of bugs yet either. The only problem I had so far is that on Dreamweaver’s WYSIWYG design screen, sometimes some things don’t look the way they’re supposed to. But that’s not a big deal, because it takes me less than a second to go to my browser and see how the page looks there. The design screen at least gives you a reasonably good idea of whether you’re going on the right track with your coding. Also, even when you’re working in the code view, you still have many powerful dreamweaver features to help you get stuff done faster and easier.
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