Ixnay on the Dreamweaver-nay

Ever since I shelled out money for CS3 and then the upgrade to CS4, I’ve been looking for more opportunities to use it. So I figured that I’d give Dreamweaver CS4 a shot as my website development environment for a month or so.

The verdict: don’t.

Subversion fail

One enticing feature that caused me to upgrade was Subversion integration. I’ve developed some feelings for SVN over the past couple years. So I felt that Dreamweaver + Subversion = Happiness.

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver needs to sit down with Subversion for some relationship counseling. When you hook Dreamweaver up with Subversion, it automatically adds significant load time every time you expand a folder in the site tree.

Here’s how the conversation goes between me and my Mac:

Chris: “I want to open the images folder.”

Chris’s Finger: ::Click::

Chris’s Mac: ::Spinny beach ball of death::

::5 seconds later::

Chris’s Mac: “Here are your images in the folder.”

Your experience may be a little different on Windows. But at least on the Mac, it’s dog slow.

Unresponsive pulldown menus

That brings to me about another beef with Dreamweaver CS4 on the Mac. Sometimes the in-product pulldown menus will stop responding altogether. You then need to hover your mouse over the menu for 15-20 seconds before it will let you click anything.

Ridiculous! This is unacceptable performance considering that I have a MacBook Pro with 2 gigabytes of RAM and a Core Duo processor.

Crash and burn

Lastly, I can’t get Contribute CS4 to open on my Mac anymore. I’m not doing anything special with it. It starts hanging, and that’s the story. No coming back.

Oh yeah, and the other programs like Fireworks will also throw an error when I simply close them.

Good job, Adobe. Walk yourself into extinction, why don’t you? Dreamweaver has been a special program for me since version 4. But now it’s getting to the point where I can barely stand using it anymore.