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Roy · Oct 28, 2003, 08:45 PM

I'm surprised more news sites have not covered the problems with Dreamweaver MX 2004. I've personally had a lot of problems with it, as have friends, and there are a lot of very unhappy people who paid (highly) for a very, very poor upgrade.

Macromedia now has a performance questionnaire buried inside its emerging issues page:

Macromedia's Emerging Issues on Dreamweaver

snerdini · Oct 28, 2003, 09:00 PM

Thanks for the link. We are/were debating at work on whether to upgrade or not, and this may seal it for us at least for a while. I guess Macromedia will patch it if enough people complain loudly or not enough people buy.

My big concern is that the Macromedia products seem to be of lower quality on the Mac platform. I realize that we're probably the smaller percentage of sales, but don't we deserve the same quality products?

Roy · Oct 28, 2003, 09:12 PM

I've used Macromedia over Adobe alternatives for some time and even did their certification exams. MX is a good product--perhaps even the best (IMO), but MX 2004 reminds me of early attempts of MS Office on the Mac. Its sloppy and simply doesn't work the way it should.

Several attempts to get support have resulted in no response, and the Macromedia Usenet Group is so crowded that getting help with specific problems is difficult.

I was pleased they are at last looking at MX 2004 as a problem product, but I genuinely feel I've been ripped off in buying this upgrade. Hopefully they'll fix it.

Having said that, Fireworks 2004 is great. Flash 2004 is also 'OK', but it also has a few performance bugs in the Mac version.

mishap · Oct 28, 2003, 10:21 PM

I've been using MX 04 for a little over a month and i dont get any slow downs while working...it is much better than the 6.1 version.

The interface is so much cleaner as well and doenst feel clunky like 6.1.

jasong · Oct 28, 2003, 11:24 PM

Add me to the list of people who are happy with MX 2004. Better interface and I have found it to be faster that MX overall.

-- Jason

Roy · Oct 28, 2003, 11:30 PM

Hmm. Well that's good to know some people are happy. I'm still a supporter at heart having invested so much time over the years.

In terms of speed, I agree caching and some such things are faster, but I get real problems with screen redraw in Design mode. As I've not got support elsewhere, if anyone has any idea how I can improve performance, please let me know. (Even Macromedia recognizes the slow speed as an issue tho', and has a series of recommendations on their site.)

workerbee · Oct 29, 2003, 04:07 AM

Has anyone found a way (which does not entail buying a Dual 2GHz G5 maxed out on RAM) to speed up window dispay in DW MX 04? While some of the new css features really are a great help, and the hand-coding environment is superb, it all feels just very sluggish when switching between windows or display modes (code view/design view) takes a few secondes each end every time. Sometimes the context popup in code view also does pop up, but refuses to select anything, which makes it somewhat less useful

TiBook 800, 10.2.8, 1GB RAM.

workerbee · Oct 29, 2003, 04:14 AM

Originally posted by snerdini:
My big concern is that the Macromedia products seem to be of lower quality on the Mac platform.

MM software is nowadays done exclusively on and for Windows, and then ported to OS X by an Indian company, AFAIK.

philzilla · Oct 29, 2003, 04:34 AM

this thread should be merged with this one, to keep all this stuff in the same place

speed issues, redrawing, backwards developing, etc. Macromedia software on a Mac isn't what it used to be, that's for sure. sad, because i used to really love it.

Gee4orce · Oct 29, 2003, 05:46 AM

As I understand it, a large portion of the application is actually written in Javascript

No wonder it's unbearably slow.

Someone send Macromedia a link to CSS Edit - show 'em how it sould be done !

workerbee · Oct 29, 2003, 09:46 AM

Originally posted by Gee4orce:
As I understand it, a large portion of the application is actually written in Javascript No wonder it's unbearably slow.

Someone send Macromedia a link to CSS Edit - show 'em how it sould be done !

Writing the app in JS has advantages as well: keeps it very open and expandable.
True, CSS Edit is very very nice, but DW MX 04 does a lot more, IMHO. The "Relevant CSS" panel is simply brilliant, you can see not only your current element's CSS, but also all its structural parent elements with their CSS rules, and it even strikes through the rules that are not cascading down.

If it only ran faster.