There must be a successor, right?
Pinegrow Web Editor [0] (I’m the author) gets a lot of ex-Dreamweaver users who are looking for a more modern alternative.
Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
111–120 of 183 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#112The last time I used Dreamweaver was in 2009 when I was putting together a site at a small business, my first job after college in a recession-hit market.
These days I know HTML/CSS pretty well, but do still use a DW-style tool to build simple websites without an IDE: Bootstrap Studio[0]. with a customizable barebones Bootstrap grid system under the hood. It's pretty powerful, GUI-based flexbox positioning, custom code support, split code/design view, SFTP upload built-in. I've used it to export an HTML design to flat files, and edit them in an IDE to hook it up to CMS logic, so there isn't any app lock-in or spaghetti code.
A new feature I really like is the "blog" function, where you can assign a folder to be the "blog", and the app will build an index page containing all those entries upon hitting "publish". The final export is all static HTML and CSS, so it's a way to upload to places like Amazon S3 and Neocities without the need for an underlying server-side blog platform.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#113I had to read the question twice. Dreamweaver was the go-to in 2010 ? I think it was already well on its decline by then. At a new job in 2003 one of my first tasks was to generate new “heat map” code since the company was updating the background image file for 50-state map interfaces. Dreamweaver had the best interface for doing that work, so I got a copy and spent a couple days carefully tracing the 50 state outlin…
That depends on how people remember "decline". Blackberry was thought to be dead in 2009, 2 years after the iPhone, but that year BB sold more devices than ever.
For a long time, "UI design" was done in Adobe Photoshop, so using Adobe Dreamweaver to build out the final product and upload to SFTP was a perfectly serviceable workflow. Back then, websites were needed for a Google presence. Today you can have a business through a Facebook page, or pay to advertise on Google Maps or Yelp. Anything more complicated and you'd need a full SaaS ecommerce platform, not something that only does static HTML pages like DW.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#114I remember unmessing webpage layout from the dreamweaver generated html by hand so it could be templated for the actual website on my first job. Never again!
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#115People keep telling me to use Dreamweaver but I stick with what works: FrontPage 98
I was a kid the last time I touched front page. Why did my simple site need front page extensions on the server? It was basically a static site. Finding a free web host with those extensions was near impossible.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#116Dreamweaver? Who remembers Drumbeat 2000?
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#117I like dreamweaver. But I could still code html by hand with HotDogPro. The one that I really miss is Macromedia Fireworks. The perfect mix between vector editor + html editor + OOP. And to think that it did all of that in the metadata of a binary format (png). Nothing has come close.
If you hadn't post this comment, I would have. Fireworks could have been Figma, it could have been the default platform every designer used. But Adobe didn't understand it, they saw it as a weird Photoshop competitor and shelved it. The last few versions bundled with CS were clearly neglected maintenance releases. I finally stopped using my slowing rotting copy in about 2014 when I got a Mac with a retina screen and…
I held on until 2020. At some point I had to give up MacOS updates to keep it going.
I still haven't found an acceptable replacement, choosing instead to design in-browser with CSS. Of course this means I can't make graphic heavy designs that I can slice and export with transparent PNGs, but we haven't cycled back to that sort of design yet so I'll be OK with minimalist crap for a while.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#118I think the emerging meta seems to be using LLMs that will create HTML components for you from your Figma storyboards. And also to let another LLM create your Figma storyboards from your novel design ideas. And asking a third LLM to give you some novel design ideas.
You forgot a fourth LLM will be the one using the site.
And a fifth LLM created from training data scraped from the site.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#119I remember feeling like a power user upgrading from Frontpage 98 to Dreamweaver and being able to hot swap between code and the live view. Dreamweaver rolled a ton of then-groundbreaking features into a great interface.
Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?
#120Nobody uses it to build anything professional, it's a cute toy
It is always funny to see "professional" code or tools compared with "toys". In reality, it is precisely the "professional", "enterprise" stuff that turns out to be a giant pile of shit (which we rarely get to see from outside). There are professional businesses storing their main database in Excel, while the amateurs obsess over whether Postgres is scalable enough.
Real professionals use MongoDB because it is web scale.