Adobe fail

[WannaBe_80z]

Trying to watch some Dreamweaver videos of the new features etc on adobe.com and it keeps saying I don't have flash player installed yet I'm on other sites at the same time with flash...

fail.

[asheep_uk]

Oh dear.

Dreamweaver is a fail of a product though. I don’t know who keeps buying it, it’s an over-bloated text editor with little support for any modern standards that people actually use. Ever tried typing in an RGBA value into it’s CSS editor? Tells you you’re wrong.

[joshstrike]

asheep...
I still use DW for my php editing in OS X. Old habits I guess. But it does drive me crazy most of the time. The only reason I use it is for color markup and to mass find/replace on old sites with a lot of pages. What do you use?

[jAQUAN]

I highly recommend Aptana for all of that josh. FDT is the best actionscript editor but I use Aptana for everything else, (php, css, html, xml, python etc.)

[joshstrike]

Aptana. Looks nice. I'll check it out. I tend to be very reluctant to upgrade anything I use on a daily basis.

So you're an FDT fan? I've never tried it. Looks nice, but what would it do for me that Flex Builder 3 doesn't? I still do all my AS3 in FB3. I tried Flash Builder 4 and chucked it out; it just made me uneasy. I don't want or need their data bindings or suggested workflow, or any of that catalyst crap. And I don't use flex components or mxml layouts...I just want a project/text editor that links me to the script where I called a variable when I need it, and FB3 is fine for that...

[asheep_uk]

asheep...
I still use DW for my php editing in OS X. Old habits I guess. But it does drive me crazy most of the time. The only reason I use it is for color markup and to mass find/replace on old sites with a lot of pages. What do you use?

Wow – there are two brilliant apps for Mac, both much cheaper and much better than Dreamweaver.

Coda by Panic, who make Transmit. Comes with a really nice CSS editor (makes Dreamweaver’s look like an afterthought, which it probably was) and handles changes and file uploading really well*– save a file, it adds it to the upload list, once you’ve made enough changes hit Publish and it’ll upload just those files. My favourite. $99

Espresso by MacRabbit. I use this for larger projects, there isn’t a CSS editor (because they have a sister product for that), but it does handle writing CSS by hand better than Coda. Handles multiple servers for the same project really well, with various FTP styles (merge, update). Also has RegExes to power its find & replace – a massive time saver. $79.95

Dreamweaver by Adobe. I guess it does do the whole WYSIWYG thing, but soon as you use more than one line of PHP, it’s pointless. $399.00

Both Coda and Espresso do coloured code and code autocomplete. Both have support for things like PHP and jQuery. Neither of them have Dreamweaver’s disastrous check-in check-out system.

[joshstrike]

Ah. I looked at Coda. I think I see the disconnect. If I were using PHP to make web UIs, that would probably be the way I'd go...

Bizarrely, I only do two things with Dreamweaver. One is straight HTML w/ almost no CSS, that's newsletter layouts for one group of clients. For that stuff, the split-screen is a big time saver since a lot of the copy-paste stuff can be done on the wysiwyg side and just cleaned up real quick in the code.

The other thing I use it for is pure back-end stuff in PHP; stuff that never sees the light of an end-user's screen, is purely sorting, game methods and processing against SQL db's with all the in/out done through an AMF gateway to a flash front-end.

Once in awhile I'll have a call to write some Javascript with it, but I'm just as happy writing that with TextEdit... And there are a couple older websites I maintain that do some actual hypertext processing to the frontend, but I don't have the patience to set up a test server, especially with DW, just so I can pass arguments to the pages and see them in my editor; I'm fine with hitting F12 and just reloading them in firefox when I make an edit.

Actually the whole idea of having my FTP program and local server map exist inside my IDE kind of rubs me the wrong way. Just a rambling aside, but when DW was young and I was, too, back in 1998, I worked at a web shop in SF that demanded we run our workflow through DW's site setups (that's how long I've been using the stupid program - 12 years). The thing is, once you've got that set up in DW, it's very easy to get confused and up the wrong version of something to the production server. You're deep in code, suddenly someone says "fix this", next thing you know you just put a broken thing you were working on, right on a live site, and you're scrambling to find the backup copy. It's not for me. Now I do my live PHP edits through nano or pico over ssh; at least it forces me to pay close attention to what I'm doing...

[argonauta]

I highly recommend Aptana for all of that josh.

I can't stand eclipse. Aptana has some good things, but in the end it's eclipse. I only use it for air dev.

I use Notepad++ for everything, except actionscript.

[jAQUAN]

Heh we all know you hate eclipse argo. You just never explain why.
Now I would never defend eclipse as the only foundation right for the job, but it has a huge support network and most likely, what ever your flavor is, their will be a module that runs it in eclipse. From Ant to Subclipse, to PyDev to Smarty to Django you're going to have an easier time folding it into eclipse than just bouncing around in different apps.

I will say that due to the eclipse level preferences being mixed in with what ever is built on top of it, setting up your environment can be enraging. This is the only thing I'll give FlashBuilder credit for since they removed most of it.

FlashBuilder is also easier for getting a new Air project up and running but it's not enough of a trade off to enjoy developing in it vs. FDT. FDT's code highlighting, hinting, formatting, class, variable and function generation, debugging and unit testing just make it a smarter app.

Here is a great post on why FB falls short.
http://jessewarden.com/2010/09/adobe...up-to-par.html

And here is a great video showing how quickly you can get around in FDT not to mention a great tut for robotlegs.
http://johnlindquist.com/2009/11/18/...ideo-tutorial/

[joshstrike]

That's funny. Most of the things that guy lists as issues with FB -- especially as far as they pertain to FB3 -- are the things I'm really glad my IDE doesn't do for me. Like type completion dropdowns before a dot... as it is, I usually don't want them after a dot; only sometimes. I hit the control key constantly to get rid of the dropdown. When I'm on a roll, I don't like to think in terms of going through several options. And as for auto-importing...I hate it. I never import classes that way (I also don't use the wildcard format). I like my imports organized in my way, flash.display.* first, then events.*, then fl.* classes, then my toolkits, then project-specific classes last. Auto-import is always a mess. The only time I wish it would work in FB3 that it doesn't is when typing an argument inside a new function, because I sometimes forget to include when I'm at that point in a line of code...

So I guess it's really down to personal preference when you get to that level...

[edit: escape key, not control. editedit: I don't even know what I hit, I just get annoyed and hit everything. And...best reason to use FB3... it's freeeee =)]

[jAQUAN]

In FDT, you can just hit command+option+o (I think) and it will clean up all of the imports including removing ones you don't use. It also alphabetizes them by package and auto-shrinks the whole import block. Don't you get annoyed at not being able to auto-generate event handlers?

FlashDevelop is still probably my favorite due to its freeness and excellent spelling correction in its autocomplete. Alas, I'm on a mac now.

[joshstrike]

Yeah, I like FlashDevelop a lot...it's super clean to use. If I weren't on a mac I'd probably use it, too.

Auto-generate event handlers? I never heard of such a thing. But...I have weird coding habits. That would probably totally screw me up. For instance, I usually send all similarly functioning over/out mouse events to a single handler that switches on the event type, instead of separate handlers. And a lot of the time, the events I listen for are subclassed from Event and have data attached, but dispatched from unrelated classes. So I'm not looking for vartype:Event, or CustomEvent.READY, I'm looking for a CustomEvent that's typed to SomeOtherClass.FINISHED with a bunch of other expected values passed in the event object. Is FDT smart enough to know the qualified classname of whatever event is going to be dispatched based only on the string type you write to addEventListener? It would have to check in the dispatching class to see where it dispatches event(s) of that string type and then find out what class those event objects actually belong to...

[jAQUAN]

if you type out something like this
myobj.addEventListener(MyEvent.MY_TYPE, onMyType, false, 0, true);

FDT would allow you to place your cursor anywhere within 'onMyType' and hit comman+1 where you would get a drop down of choices, one of them being 'generate handler' which would add this to your class.

private function onMyType(event:MyEvent):void{

}

That video I linked to earlier shows some of this going on.

[joshstrike]

That's pretty ludicrous.

I admit I didn't watch the video. You got me. I had a bad thing w/ FDT when they started offering free copies for anyone working on an open source project. The guy who wrote it didn't consider StrikeRemoting and StrikeDisplay worthy of his promotion. Maybe it was the way he phrased his response that irritated me...I don't remember exactly. I got kinda mad and wrote him a PO'd email telling him to stick his glorified text editor where the sun don't shine...and made my peace with FB3.

Yeah, the truth finally comes out. I'm a cheap bastard.

[jAQUAN]

Nothing wrong with that. To be honest, if I wasn't cheap, I might give intelliJ a try.

[gerbick]

Coda, TextWrangler and CSSEdit. That's what I've used to avoid Dreamweaver - I'm also a creature of habit - but trying to like Dreamweaver CS5 after falling out with it ages ago.

IntelliJ is awesome.

[jAQUAN]

I just hate any editor that generates CSS according to the W3C. Modern browser development requires filters/hacks like the ones mentioned in my fk css link in my footer and I'm just mystified why, in today's landscape, there's isn't a good editor with a design view that generates those.

[atRax]

IntelliJ is awesome.