2 Replies Latest reply: Nov 26, 2014 8:09 PM by Web Magi RSS

    Message from the Dreamweaver Product team

    rajnishb EmployeeAdmins

      Now that the October release is out, we have collected significant feedback from our users. Based on the feedback, we would like to share our thinking

      in terms of the short/mid-term road-map of the product.

       

      We are currently focused on the following vectors :

      • Responsive Design
      • Code View
      • Live View enhancements

       

      Responsive Design

      The number of Dreamweaver users that are creating responsive sites in increasing by the day. We intend to provide better tooling to make you more efficient.

      We are exploring ways to visualize media queries, support for prominent open source frameworks and starter templates.

       

      Code View

      We would invest in making the coding surface, modern. In addition, we intend  to bring new tooling around CSS pre-processors.

      Please expect some significant improvements in the next version of Dreamweaver. The intent here is to increase your productivity.

       

      Live View

      As most of you would be aware, Live View uses the same rendering surface that's used by Chrome.

      This allows us to provide accurate rendering experience of your code. We will continue to invest in improving Live View.

      We understand there has been some concern related to Design View's future. We are working on prioritizing critical Design View specific workflows and bring them to Live View.

       

      You will see new innovative features coming out in the forthcoming releases. We welcome your feedback on the road-map.

      I hope this post gives you visibility on where Dreamweaver is going.

       

      Best regards,

      Rajnish Bharti

      Senior Product Manager

        • 1. Re: Message from the Dreamweaver Product team
          Nancy O. CommunityMVP

          Thanks for the update.  It's much appreciated .

           

          Nancy O.

          • 2. Re: Message from the Dreamweaver Product team
            Web Magi Community Member

            Providing better tooling around Responsive Web Design (separate from the Fluid Grid Layout system) is excellent news. I'm really looking forward to that, as well as the improvements to Code View. My main concern is not so much the feature we all know as Design View, and its planned demise at some point, but that there is an ongoing effort to bring the super fast content production and editing features of Design View into a live rendering of a web page or mobile app. Of all the applications that I have tested, including Webflow, Macaw, Reflow, and Pinegrow, none of them have been able to provide the same level of speed and efficiency for producing and managing large volumes of content (text, images, and other assets) as Design View. If anyone knows of such a tool, please share it. I would love to give it a test run.

             

            I get it, Dreamweaver deserves a great design surface. We need a surface that we can build and style structures on; one that gives us an accurate representation of the design itself, while still producing good code. Design View is no longer that surface, if it ever was. But what it lacks as a design surface, it makes up for as a content production and editing surface - many times over. From my chair, Design View is the best website content production and editing surface that I have ever used, while Live View, with its tedious HUD system, is quite possibly the worst. Why spend months (maybe years) attempting to force Live View to do what Design View already does really well? Why do that when you could simply re-purpose Design View and move on?

             

            I understand that you can't leave Design View in, as it is, for very much longer. The name itself just doesn't fit its originally intended purpose. So find a new name, give it a new purpose.

             

            I build mobile apps in Dreamweaver using jQuery Mobile as my framework. The last app I built was a trivia game with 100 pages. That's 4 HTML files representing the 4 levels, with each file containing 25 <div data-role="page"> questions, and each question a right and wrong modal popup panel for the answers. Obviously, the plan was to have a data driven solution for producing those pages, but that's another story for another time. Having Live View available next to Code View really is a very useful workflow, but had I built that app with Fluid Grid Layout (Not that I would, I'm just making a point) prior to the latest 2014.1 release, then I would no longer have access to Design View for editing the contents of that app. How would I edit the content on "data-role" page 65 for example? Try to play the game in Live View until I reach that section? Use Code View? There are over 2000 lines of code in each HTML file. Code View is not a viable content production and editing surface, and neither is Live View. Design View on the other hand, is exactly that.

             

            I spent several hours working on an update to an older jQM app a few days ago. I recorded a lot of that maintenance session. You might be interested in seeing just how difficult it is attempting to edit existing content in Live View over time. It's not pretty. It seems that Live View is not always editable. It stops being editable over, and over, and over, causing me to have to wait - with my project timer ticking on. Hundreds of unnecessary clicks just to activate the editable features of Live View. How is that better than clicking once in Design View? How is hundreds of unnecessary clicks in Live View better than clicking once to switch over to Design View - where speed and efficiency live? Finally I gave up, turned back the timer, switched over to Design View, and I was back in business.

             

            One of the main components of every next-generation web design app that I've tested, is the ability to see and interact with your HTML structures on the design surface as you work. I assume you will be developing tooling around this for your upcoming Responsive Design feature, otherwise it's probably not going to be very useful. So do you add another button to turn these visual controls off? You could do what the Reflow team did, add a Preview Mode. Wouldn't that be something - a Preview Mode for Live View? ;-)

             

            Maybe the future of web design is a surface that is equally brilliant at designing HTML structures as it is with the production and editing of mountains of content. Maybe you will blow the competition out of the water this year by creating exactly that with Dreamweaver's Editable Live View. Or maybe next year, or the next, or the next, or...