Continuing down the road of forgotten or overlooked features in Dreamweaver, have you ever gone to save a file, and due to the fact that you’d been navigating around your harddrive in a previous dialog, Dreamweaver suddenly seems to have “forgotten” where your site is? It happens to me all the time – in fact, it just happened again, so I thought I’d share one of those little nuggets that make you say, “OMG! I can’t believe I never noticed that before!”. It’s called the Site Root button. And the worst (ok, actually it’s the best) thing about it is that it’s been right under your nose in the Save dialog. (more…)

It’s funny in some really sad way that, over the years, Dreamweaver has added soooo many features that you can’t help but forget one every now and then. And then, when you rediscover it, it’s like bumping into a long lost friend on the street! Such was the case recently as I was working on a piece of a page that was going to need a number of “wrappers” to get the effect just right.

Obviously most DW users would simply head for the source code, type the opening <div> tag (in this case), and then type the closing </div> tag in its proper place. While this doesn’t seem all too complicated, we’re often confronted with needing to wrap multiple, nested elements and finding the “right spot” to put the closing tag gets tedious. That’s when the woefully forgotten Quick Tag Editor comes in! (more…)

Today is a historic day in the world of web design and development because our jobs just got a lot easier with the preview release of BrowserLab, a future web-based service from Adobe, now available on Adobe Labs. BrowserLab takes the drudgery out of finding the bugs and differences in your pages between the different browsers and browser versions.

Of course, the idea of a service like this is not new – but BrowserLab offers a unique feature called “onion skin view”, which allows you to overlay the view from the selected browsers on top of each other. This way it’s easy to see the differences between the browser renderings. And if you are a Dreamweaver CS4 user, it gets even better – there is a new extension which will add BrowserLab to your Preview in Browser list. This means that you don’t even have to upload your pages to your site to have BrowserLab show you “what’s up”.

No, you’re not seeing double – oh, wait… you ARE seeing double!

In fact, I’ve been using BrowserLab quite a bit and it even helped me discover a “bug” right here in my blog when it was viewed in Internet Explorer 6 (and no, you can’t see it – because I fixed it immediately). As a Mac user, I keep VMWare running all the time (our corporate email is run off of an Exchange server, if you must know) and that means that I have IE available – but only as IE 8. And the idea of firing up another instance just to check IE 6 pains me to no end. So, of course, BrowserLab has got me (virtually) jumping up and down! I hope you’ll find it as usual as I already have. And be sure to post your comments and suggestions – afterall, that’s the reason that we put this stuff out there early. We want your feedback!