Dreamweaver MX 2004...Not So Hot...
MBA midterm tests in Finance and Marketing along with work projects have been eating every free moment the last couple of weeks. I am seeing some light at the end of the tunnel, however. Tomorrow I'm finishing up web design training in Gleinfield, and Thursday and Friday I will be assisting with the technology conference up at the Turtle Mountain Community College. It should be fun to spend some time with my coworkers again.
I'm now using my office desktop as my main development machine after installing Macromedia Studio MX 2004 (that, and the evaluation copy expired on my laptop). I've spent most of my time in the new version of Dreamweaver, MX 2004, and so far I'm not impressed. Feature-wise it's great, but bug-wise I'm really getting my money's worth. Everything seems to cause the program to crash. Switching between documents, switching between standard view and code view, copying and pasting text, pressing the SHIFT key and 8 to make an asterisk, you name it, it'll crash Dreamweaver. I figure that today alone I had to restart Dreamweaver at least 20 times, and that's no exageration.
I've been scouring the Dreamweaver Forums at Macromedia with limited success, and also have a support incident logged with technical support. Other people seem to be having the same type of problems as me, but the main issue simply seems to be that I (and everyone else) can't reproduce the crashes. One time the program will crash when switching between html documents, other times it will be fine. Sometimes it will crash when simply typing in code view, other times it will be alright. I have plenty of troubleshooting experience from my help desk days in college, and this is one of the most frustrating things to run into. The technical support person I spoke to earlier suggested doing a couple of things:
- Temporarily disable Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition
- Disable all video card acceleration
- Uninstall Dreamweaver and then reinstall under the Windows Safe Mode
I have already done the first two, seperately and together, and Dreamweaver still crashes. I'm considering trying number three, but when looking at the forums, it doesn't seem like this has helped many people. One guy said it reinstalled under Safe Mode plus installed on a completely new system with no other software and still experienced the same crashes. I love Macromedia and their products, but this is a bit much. It's kind of hard to do your job when you spend half of it restarting the main program you work in...
Other Dreamweaver MX 2004 Issues I've Experienced (will try to update):
- Templates: I love them and hate them. There seems to be an issue where Dreamweaver will fail to update every page using a template. I experienced this one yesterday when I made some accessibility changes to the hybrid.dwt template. I selected "Update Pages Using...", selected hybrid.dwt, and waited as it updated. I think it actually updated about half of the pages attached to that template. I'm looking forward to the day I can move everything to Smarty templates!
