I have just recently purchased myself the Adobe Creative Suite 3 and installed Bridge, Contribute, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop and Soundbooth. They are very good, except a few things that could be better…
The first thing I noticed with CS3 is that when you install Photoshop and Fireworks from the suite, some of the image file formats, such as 'JPG' are not associated with Photoshop, they just stay with Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Fireworks then decides that it wants to be the main editor for PNG files. Funnily enough, I do not recall any point in the setup where it asked me what applications I want to associate with what file types; it just does it for me, but evidently not very well. I thought: "ah, not a big deal I will just have to change the associations the first time I run Photoshop or Fireworks", but nothing came up and I could not find any way of doing it from within the applications.
In the end I had to save a 1×1 pixel image in 16 different formats then use the Windows file type options to change each and every one manually to open with Photoshop. Once I had got that sorted (took me the best part of half an hour) I then went to do some edits to a PHP file, and noticed that it had defaulted to opening in Notepad and not Dreamweaver!
I had to do exactly the same thing with 24 different document formats for Dreamweaver, but I couldn't be bothered to do all of them so I just did the main ones I use most of the time. In total it took me about an hour just to associate a few applications with some file types, which, incidentally could have been done automatically. I am dreading saving anything in Illustrator though.
I also think that there are a few consistency failures; Adobe have updated Photoshop, Flash, InDesign and Illustrator with the new, improved user interface and yet left Dreamweaver and Fireworks with the older style interface. I would love it if Dreamweaver had the newer interface as it would be a lot easier to have more/less information on the screen at the same time. You can do this already, but it isn't as advanced, because when you undock the panels in Dreamweaver they are placed into a window instead of floating. Also when you dock them to the side of the screen and collapse them all, there is still a load of wasted space underneath them, which could be filled up with the code or design views if the panels floated.
Other than that, the ones that I have used are excellent and do their jobs perfectly!
Bull3t's Blog is a next generation web log written by me, Philip Hughes (also known as Bull3t), a first-year college student living in England, aged 17. I write this blog for the sake of doing so, posting about anything I see fit. 
So what now?
You've reached the end of this post. Seeing as you made it this far means you might be interested in the following related articles and resources.16 Comments
September 23rd, 2007
#1
Adobe always makes quality products, but what happened to your happened to me countless times too. They just suck at little details like these, they rock at everything else though :)
September 23rd, 2007
#2
Very true, they do rock at most things, such as quality applications. They just miss out on the little things that should give their applications the edge over most others, nothing big really though.
By the way, thanks for returning the favour of commenting. Hehe.
September 23rd, 2007
#3
No problem it's almost a principle. I may even write about the importance of reciprocal commenting.
September 23rd, 2007
#4
Sounds like a steaming hot post, I may have to write my own and throw you a trackback, hehe.
September 27th, 2007
#5
I'm just loovin' the rapidity of the CS3, it's more light than CS2 ;)
September 27th, 2007
#6
Yeah it does feel lighter than CS3, I thought that was just the fact that I upgraded my RAM to 2GB just before I installed it, but obviously it runs smoother than CS2 on other computers too.
September 27th, 2007
#7
Yeah I have already tried cs2 and i upgraded to cs3 last week, I find that this last one is really lighter even with a lot of installed plugins, it's a real good thing that adobe does with the CS3
PS : can you give me the name of the plugin you use for the related posts please ? I use similar_post but it don't worl with WP2.3
September 27th, 2007
#8
I used Photoshop and Dreamweaver of CS2 and couldn't be bothered with the others, but with CS3 I have installed nearly everything. They are pretty amazing programs.
The plugin I use for related posts is called Category Tagging, but it doesn't work 100% with WordPress 2.3 – I had to make changes to it to get it to work properly. If you want, I can send you the edited version through email.
September 27th, 2007
#9
Yes, that will be nice.
May be you can contact the plugin's author and tell him if you can depose it on the wordpress plugins' directory ;)
Thanks so much.
September 28th, 2007
#10
Okay, I have sent you the plugin and I have contacted the owner of the plugin, who has recently written this on his blog:
I hope that I can continue to develop it for him in the near future.
September 28th, 2007
#11
yh, nice ! let us in touch ;)
September 30th, 2007
#12
Okay, well I have just released the newer version of the Category Tagging plugin, under my name. I am just waiting for the author to approve it, I will then start to work on a new-and-improved version. Then also upload it to the WordPress plugin directory.
November 19th, 2008
#13
Dreamweaver is in definite need of an update. I really enjoy using the program but they need to develop more like they have with the other programs.
December 23rd, 2008
#14
I would try checking the adobe website to see if they have any updates that could fix this problem for you.
February 26th, 2009
#15
Yes, like all html-editors nowadays they are left to rott. Really liked Dreamweaver and Fireworks, very easy way to create small homepages!
March 1st, 2009
#16
@taylor:
The newest version of Dreamweaver (in CS4) is much better. Apparently they've taken our advice.
@Richard:
I've tried that but like most large company websites it's hard to find the thing you want. They didn't really have a clue.
@Per:
Yeah I use Dreamweaver all the time. I've tried a few text editors that claim to be code-editors as well, but they just aren't up to the same standards. Ever since I moved on from Microsoft Office Frontpage I've stuck to Dreamweaver.
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