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Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

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41–50 of 183 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

#41

People keep telling me to use Dreamweaver but I stick with what works: FrontPage 98

That's nothing, you’ll have to pry my Mac with System 8 and GoLive CyberStudio (winner of most 90s application name) from my cold, dead hands.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

#42
post #34

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 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).

You're right, considering that Dreamweaver is SaaS now. Were it a single purchase it would actually be more affordable for independent webmasters making websites as one could buy a single copy of Dreamweaver, make several websites, and host them on a single server with multiple domain names, while not paying the subscription over and over again.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

#43
post #13

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…

> 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 declarative HTML, but I suspect to some enterprising person, that route is still open.

That's just sourcemaps I think. Pretty standard stuff, but the site have to provide the maps.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

#44
I had no idea that you could even still get a copy of Dreamweaver anymore, but a quick search seems to confirm that, indeed, you can still get it.

As a teenager I used to use a pirated copy of Dreamweaver, and it was cool but I eventually just learned HTML since I found that the stuff I wrote ended up being better than the stuff being generated by Dreamweaver, and of course that had the advantage of being legal and free. I'm sure that the HTML exporter has gotten a lot better since 2005, but I have moved as far away from web development as I could since then because web development is terrible.

A small part of me wants to try the latest Dreamweaver now but I don't have a Windows or Mac computer anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

#45
I 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.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

#48
post #34

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 (…

Does it? IMO it looks very outdated and cluttered compared to most editors. Clicking around a bit, this screen specifically stood out to me as lacking a lot of visual hierarchy: https://i.imgur.com/Y7iBS2p.png. It just kind of reads as a visual jumble with too many elements competing for your attention with slightly different/incoherent styling—I count 5 different unique button styles on this page alone, with some buttons having flat borders, some buttons having shiny highlights, and 3 completely different shades of grey button borders. Definitely doesn't feel "designed" to me.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

#49
post #31

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. 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.

What's even more interesting is when you look at some of those tools, many of them were actually way more straightforward to use to design websites without much coding than what we have today. Just like how we had all those CRUD rapid app development tools that would build the app for you just from a database model (Access, PowerBuilder, Delphi, FoxPro...). While what we have today is arguably way more powerful, we've lost some of that simplicity (at least for more trivial use cases) along the way.

Re: Ask HN: Is anyone still using Dreamweaver?

#50
post #15

There must be a successor, right?

Webflow ? Squarespace ? I assumed that segment had been occupied by CMS and SaaS companies.

Absolutely Squarespace (and WordPress). Non-technical website maintainers don’t want an HTML editor; they want their website to have an edit button.
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