31–40 of 183 posts
Early 2000s Adobe was stacked with web technology. They knew where the world was headed, but didn't quite capture it the right way.
Flash, Shockwave, Dreamweaver, Macromedia Homesite, Fireworks, Coldfusion, Adobe AIR, LiveMotion, Actionscript 3.0, MXML, Flex.
They shipped so much software, it's incredible.
I 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.
Yep this does seem to be the emerging meta. Have you found success with some models over others?
I still cant believe what Adobe did with Flash.
But this sent me down a memory rabbit hole…a former manager of mine loved Brackets. Brackets was Adobe’s open-source text editor (https://opensource.adobe.com/brackets.io/?lang=en) that was sorta VSCode, but prettier.
Adobe sunsetted that project, but it still apparently somewhat lives on, in the form of Phoenix Code. (https://phcode.dev) And it still does look very “designed” in comparison to VSCode. I really like the default typography, tag highlighting, and some of the details of the text editor itself.
Dreamweaver solved no one's problems.
1) Regular users didn't need it: they couldn't use it for publishing their web-sites anyway. They quickly just switched to social media for publishing their content.
2) Dreamweaver was not a great tool for professionals too. Its code editor was not convenient and overall the program felt really poor in features. It never could catch up with new features of web. Besides, no one creates whole pages and Dreamweaver didn't support dividing a page into parts like header, main part, menu, articles footer etc, as far as I remember. This would be a way too much complicated task to implement.
So it was just a tool for students. If you were learning HTML, it was a fine tool to learn it. That's it. It was never used in real work.
The name "Dreamweaver" is really cool though, I must give them credit. It sounds even way too cool for such a simple program as it was. It should have been used for an iconic film or a video game instead.
Unexpected bottom line: do we need something like Dreamweaver which wouldn't suck? Yes. Figma got so successful because it allowed creating prototypes and was solving real life problems. Now a new program like Dreamweaver could solve the problem of quick prototyping and generating HTML code for something like React components.
Would it be a complicated app? Yes. Would it require a lot of programming? Yes. Would it immediately bring money? No. So currently it's probably won't be a good idea to work on it.
You can create something like a visual editor module for HTML pages or react components to be used in modern IDEs. Maybe even just by embedding a non-read only WebView with some cleverly butchered developer tools and sell that module to companies for a cheap subscription.
I can’t imagine anyone is still using Dreamweaver—that market must have been utterly subsumed by Squarespace. If you are a, say, small business that needs a 3–5 page marketing site with contact info and about pages, surely it makes more sense to use Squarespace (or wix, or what have you). But this sent me down a memory rabbit hole…a former manager of mine loved Brackets. Brackets was Adobe’s open-source text editor (…
I loved dreamweaver when starting out. Never got on with the WYSIWYG (hence moving on), but its ability to read your CSS file and suggest classes was great. MX was the pinnacle in early 2000s. More relevant to me though, I miss Fireworks so much. Nothing comes closer. Figma is great but web based and already shown willing to sell out everyone who trusts them.
I do!!!!!! I love dreamwaver even today, I'm surprised people don't use it, they have done an amazing job keeping it up to date - it's honestly a joy to use. Granted: I'm not a real dev/swe, just a dude who likes to mess around with webtech, still, I think "real devs" would enjoy it too, it's great to use. I learn web on dreamweaver, I would make something on the front end WYSIWYG editor, and then "turn it around" (I…
I did the same, except with Netscape Composer. That was a time where the output of the WYSIWYG editor - really, the source of any page - was pretty digestible, even to me as a middle school student. I've noticed recently that the JavaScript debugger in Firefox can "un-Webpack" (and in some cases un-minify, if I've read the inputs and outputs correctly) the code behind many sites. It's certainly not as approachable as…
Adobe still had GoLive at the time, which was basically what Dreamweaver is now, and it didn't mangle the output as much, neither did Netscape Composer (which was way more limited). Many of the simpler WYSIWYG editors (Netscape Composer, that thing AOL had, etc.) were not nearly as bad as FrontPage.
People keep telling me to use Dreamweaver but I stick with what works: FrontPage 98
Microsoft Word's "Save as Web Page" or GTFO.