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…)

You know what the problem with a program like Dreamweaver (or Flash or Photoshop or Illustrator…) is? It’s that the programs are “grown-up”. In Dreamweaver’s case, it’s over 10 years old – an eternity in software – and with each new version, new features enter the application. That means that we have to learn new keyboard shortcuts, new settings in the Preferences, and figure out how to use new tools. All of the newness and shininess is designed to make us more productive (hopefully), but I’ve begun to realize that at the same time, it can be detrimental. If you’re like me, there’s only so much gray matter left, and trying to pack all the new stuff in there means that I have to (unintentionally, of course) forget some things that I’ve known for years.

As I was recently preparing a session for a conference, I ran into one such example. Those who know me know that I spend most every day doing some kind of Javascript development. As such, I have to write <script type=”text/javascript”></script> an awful lot. Well, it occurred to me that Dreamweaver has a tool on the Insert > Common panel to accomplish this very thing. A single click triggers a dialog box through which I can select to link to an external Javascript file, or into which I can begin to type my script. Being able to quickly navigate to a file is helpful and more productive than typing by hand. But when I want to actually type a script myself, well, the dialog is confining. It doesn’t have code-hinting or completion, and it’s just too small. Frustratingly, I felt like I was “almost” there – if only I could bypass the dialog and just have it write the open/close of the script block for me, I’d be golden.

That’s when I remembered an old trick. For any of the elements in Dreamweaver’s Insert panel that cause a dialog to open before they insert the code into the page, all you need to do is to hold down the Option key when clicking upon the element. This temporarily suppresses the dialog and inserts the “default” code for that element into the page. In my case, just the <script type=”text/javascript”></script> with a blank line in between to begin writing my script. In fact, if you want to get any faster, you can turn the dialogs off completely. In the Preferences>General section, uncheck the option for showing the dialog when inserting elements. If you ever need a dialog, then the Option key does the reverse – opening the dialog for that single insert. Hope this helps… Happy coding!

If I had a dime for every time someone has asked me “what’s new in [product name goes here]“, well, you know the old saying… And while there is a ton of information on Adobe.com about Creative Suite 4, it seems that a lot of existing users of Adobe products rarely take the time to explore the site to find the information. Additionally, it’s sometimes even more difficult to read a bulletpoint and truly understand what that could potentially mean to your workflow in terms of productivity increases.

To help illustrate the productivity advantages in CS4, Adobe went out and hired a consultant to actually “clock” the differences between CS3 and CS4. Being skeptical myself by nature, I was truly impressed by some of the results. I mean, I work with CS4 everyday, and I “feel” the difference – but actually seeing the hard data was eye-opening. As a result, the Creative Solutions Evangelism team has created a series of videos to highlight some of these specific “time savings” or “productivity increases”.

The first videos are up as of today – and more will be following over the next month and a half or so. We hope you’ll check them out:

• Everyday Timesavers: Design
• Everyday Timesavers: Web
• Everyday Timesavers: Video
• Everyday Timesavers: Photography

On a related note, I’m wondering what you value when making a software purchasing decision. Is information on a web site important? Is it more important that the information is from an independent, 3rd party resource? Do you go to conferences? Is a live, in-person seminar important? I’d love to hear from you, so comment away! Cheers!