Friday, September 16, 2005

Although I have managed to resist proudly boasting about England winning the Ashes I will post this link and leave it at that ;)

Now onto Flash/Dreamweaver 8, I have been using the trial versions for a couple of days on a project that has to be exported as Flash 7, which is a shame as all the cool new features get deactivated. However, so far I have been impressed with the little additions like the tabbed panels, the object drawing option (although it really only groups an object but I suppose it saves you the hassle of doing it yourself) [UPDATE: You can change the colour of the object fill and stroke by just selecting the object so I take that last comment back!], the massively improved help files and the great new text rendering. Once I get started on a Flash 8 project I'm sure I'll get stuck into the filters and Bitmap classes.

As for Dreamweaver 8 the upgrade is quite subtle at first sight but there are some really great new time-saving features. One improvement I really like is the code-completion change, instead of just inserting a closing tag it waits for you to open a closing tag bracket and insert a slash, that may sound trivial to some people but I have spent far too long deleting closing tags when I didn't need them, and before anyone cries invalid xhtml I don't mean that I just have an opening tag!

Obviously another massive improvement is the visual css and xml support and I think this will be the biggest selling point. The ease of XSL creation is enough alone to make this upgrade worth the money, XSLT has always scared me but I now realise by looking at the code Dreamweaver produces that it is definitely not beyond my reach and is something I am going to be concentrating on over the next few months.

Anyway that's my 2 cents so far.

Jon 9:31 AM Permalink