At first place during the beta release; Macromedia Dreamweaver seemed like it would be a great program. It was a WYSIWYG editor and it would create clean code that didn’t break when changed. It also let you link the code into BBEdit so you could use the text editor.
However; upon release of the final version of Dreamweaver 1.0; it became quickly evident that this program was incredibly slow and filled with bugs. It had nothing it promised users and a lot of troubles that were hidden inside the program. The features didn’t work the way they were supposed to and a lot of the code created inside it just didn’t work in browsers. The CSS editor was very unorganized and was very unreliable. The product just didn’t work.
The second version of Macromedia’s Dreamweaver promises to be very different. It has the same appearance has the first version but it runs much faster. It is also much more reliable than version one. It isn’t perfect however. When you refresh the screen; the code doesn’t always update. It does seem to work with more browsers now though.
The table editing feature is a lot better than it was in version one. It will also allow you to covert layered documents into table based documents. They have also added better site management and content publishing tools.
One feature that will excite people is the tracing image feature that Macromedia has added to version two of Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver will also now allow you to import images such as GIF, PNG, or JPGs. This is a very good feature for people that like to create images in a different program before adding code to these images. You can then decide to create your website on top of the image you just imported. It will also allow you to add whatever elements you want and you can make images invisible so that they do not show up in user’s browser windows.
There is also a little tool added called the Macromedia Director. This is great to use if you have two monitors in use. You can see the code on one monitor and the preview of your website on the other monitor. This will surely speed up your website creation speed and give you a second to second update of the changes your code is making to your website.