It’s unfortunate that most web designers and developers pay little-to-no attention to their sites on anything but a browser running on their local computer monitor. The thought of designing a page to display properly on a mobile device or set-top browser rarely gets any braincells thrown at it. This is somewhat understandable, given the fact that the mobile browsing space is in such disarray.

But it frustrates me to no end when I need to save or print a web page, only to be given something that is at best barely useable. I’m sure most of us have had the pleasure of the four-page-print-phenomenon in which a seemingly simple web page causes the printer to spit out three additional (and completely blank) pages. It’s not rocket science to create a print stylesheet, but only the cream of the crop take the time to do it.

I think one reason that many Dreamweaver users don’t do it, is not only because they have the misconception that it’s difficult, but also because we did a really good job of hiding an essential tool for creating a print stylesheet (or handheld sheet for that matter). (more…)

Along with everything else that is going on on the ninth day of the ninth month of the ninth year of this millennium, my colleagues on the Adobe TV team have launched their completely redesigned site.

The initial version of Adobe TV was launched about 18 months ago. And while it accomplished its mission to provide a single point on the web for learning about Adobe products, it was quite honestly a mess due to a hastily thrown-together backend and an even worse user experience. Ironically, I’m almost sad to see the old site go, as I used to use it as an example of what NOT to do on the web – namely build an entire site in Flash/Flex. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash and have no problem with Flash content – especially video. There are only very limited examples of using Flash/Flex to build an entire public facing site and doing it right – so limited in fact that I can’t even think of any.

(more…)

During a recent discussion about Ajax frameworks, a comment was made suggesting that while the Spry Framework was nicely integrated into Dreamweaver and offered a wide range of options, effects and widgets, it was simply too bloated to use in production. In my usual fashion, I of course defended Spry. As the discussion progressed, we were soon huddled around my laptop, inserting various widgets from both Spry and jQuery and comparing the individual Javascript files. I have to admit that I was taken aback when we began looking at the size difference between the Spry widgets and their jQuery counterparts.

Spry Accordion vs jQuery Accordion

For those who may be unaware, Dreamweaver CS4 offers not only the ability to use the built-in Spry Framework, but also to add widgets from other frameworks such as jQuery (more…)