At the recent Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco, I had the pleasure to show off Dreamweaver CS4 and it’s improved support for Ajax in the Day 2 keynote. In addition to continued support of the Spry Framework for Ajax, Dreamweaver CS4 also now provides the ability to add jQuery, YUI and MooTools web widgets to your pages. This ability, combined with the new Live Preview and Live Code features, means that you can see and style these widgets without needing to run to the browser. In fact, due to these enhancements, lots of folks who had even “given up” on Dreamweaver in favor of hand-coding are taking another look.

If you’re already using Dreamweaver CS4 and you’ve not yet visited the Dreamweaver Exchange to download any of the widgets already available, I’d encourage you to do so. You can even head over to the exchange directly from within Dreamweaver by clicking upon the “gear” icon in the Application bar and choosing “Get More Web Widgets”. By working with the OAA (Open Ajax Alliance), we’ve made it easy for developers to package any widget which conforms to the widget specification. You can read more about all of this by checking out the Dreamweaver Widget Packager on Adobe Labs.

Among the 20 initial widgets available, one of my favorites is the phatfusion “Image Menu”. This menu uses images that slide open to expose more of the selected image, which a potential visitor could then click to head off to that section of the site.

When I saw this for the first time, I was really amazed – the only problem being that I don’t use the MooTools framework very often. Instead, I spend my time with either Spry or jQuery.

So, I decided to build the same basic functionality (in a vertical orientation) using the jQuery accordion widget – which is also what I showed during the keynote at MAX. (If you’d like to try this yourself, you’ll first need to head over to the exchange and grab the jQuery Accordion widget. And if you need the files, you can download the finished version.)
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One of the coolest things about being in your mid-forties is the fact that you can actually remember some of the best music in the world! I even still have the first rock-n-roll album that I ever bought – an original pressing of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” album. In my not-so-humble opinion, the music of the middle-to-late 60′s and 70′s far outshines almost anything being done today. And among my favorite bands of all time is/was The Byrds.

So, I loved hearing from my fellow Evangelist, Jason Levine, that Roger McGuinn had actually talked to him about Audition. In fact, Roger uses Audition all of the time – and we’re not talking about recording demos, but rather recording and mastering an entire album right in his house!

Thankfully, Roger agreed to talk about his experiences with Adobe Audition 3 and why he loves it on our own Adobe TV. If you love great music, it’s an amazing story…

Just wanted to announce that the new version of “Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4” has been released and is available in your local bookstores, as well as online. And this is not just a simple update to change screenshots. Due to the fact that Dreamweaver CS4 is so radically different from previous versions and the fact that several of these new features mean that the our web workflow actually changes (for the better), Stephanie Sullivan and I have gone over the book page-by-page. In addition to a new chapter that covers just what is new in Dreamweaver CS4, we have completely rewritten over 60% of the book. We’ve also responded to reader’s requests and enhanced the supporting files, providing incremental files, so that you can easily pick up at any point – or compare your version to ours as you work through the exercises.

Happy coding!