Tuesday, January 20, 2004
I came across this article and discussion on Macromedia Dreamweaver MX at O'Reilly's MacDevCenter site recently. Dreamweaver MX 2004 for Mac OS X by Jackie Dove -- Dreamweaver has always facilitated web design in the visual graphic art tradition. It's also famous for its accurate HTML code and organic way of letting users alternate between code and design view. Dreamweaver MX 2004 has some improvements that may tempt you to take another look at this application for your work. The article walks through an overview and talks about the various new features. It is in general a positive review. The comments turn into rantings about performance problems (and there are significant performance problems). A couple of Macromedia staffers pop in to acknowledge the problems and offer that they're at work on a fix. This isn't good enough apparently (though I was impressed) and the ranting continued. Here's what I had to say: I couldn't agree more. I registered just to say that. I want to say thanks to everyone at Macromedia working on these issues. And thanks for openly acknowledging them in the first place. You don't have to look any further than Apple for a company that does less than that. As a matter of policy it seems Apple refuses to even acknowledge huge issues with shipping products before they have a patch available and even then you have to read between the lines with the release notes to find vague references to real problems. 10.0/10.1 Server had huge problems and 10.3 Server still has big problems, though it's much improved... Panther client has problems and everything from Apple Remote Desktop to PowerSchool... iPhoto 4 is great, especially compared to the horrible performance of the previous version. There was an iPhoto article (at least one) here too and that article didn't make a big deal out of big performance issues either, if I remember correctly. As users (or administrators, managers and developers)we're as much a part of the platform as any application developer, hardware or software product or the OS itself. Do you ever think to ask yourself if you're living up to your responsibilities? Take the time to ask yourself if you're a good member of this community? These performance and stability problems are real. If they are preventing you from being productive and waiting for a promised fix isn't an option for you then unfortunately you may have some difficult choices to make. This is hardly new territory for anyone who has spent any amount of time working with IT and computer technologies. We're all disappointed with issues like these from time to time. They're an unavoiable part of the process. No one has unlimited development dollars, testing is hardly a perfect process and no one would be happy if developers endlessly sat on products chasing some unattainable perfection. It's a respected adage in IT that's it's best to avoid any 1st revision product in a production environment, whatever the product. I want to know if a developer is working in good faith. When I go through the new Dreamweaver I see a product that has a number of real improvements, new features and enhancements, that does a good job of matching the pace of the related technology and other indications that Macromedia is indeed working in good faith and I say to myself, it's too bad the performance is such an issue and I hope they can correct it and keep building toward a strong and important application (important to me and important to the platform). This ranting doesn't help anyone and certainly isn't making you anymore productive. Making note of the problems is helpful... but this thread stopped being helpful to anyone many posts ago. Feel free to comment or trackback here but you may also want to add to the discussion at macdevcenter if you have something to say.
10:18:32 AM
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