innerHTML

I’ve been having trouble with Dreamweaver crashing since upgrading to Leopard. I sent the letter below to Macrumors.com today since Adobe doesn’t seem to be much help right now. I doubt Macrumors.com will publish it, so I’ll post it here:

Not sure if this’ll make much of a story, but I’ve had some correspondence with Adobe support about Dreamweaver on Leopard and it’s not consoling. For context, I’m a full-time web developer and use Dreamweaver CS3 from about 3-8 hours a day. Since moving to Leopard (clean install of OS and app on a fresh hard drive on a 2.4ghz MacBook Pro with 4gb ram), Dreamweaver crashes anywhere from 3-10 or times a day. It usually happens during editing, closing files and when closing the application.

An email to Adobe support was responded to today. This is the telling paragraph:

“There are a number of issues encountered by Dreamweaver when on the Leopard OS. Dreamweaver CS3 wasn’t tested to work flawlessly on this system and you may encounter issues that we may have no solutions at this time.”

Wasn’t tested? What were they doing? Leopard didn’t blindside anyone with its release date. And Adobe, of any company, should have the resources to test and ready a product.

Also, one of their solutions was revealing: “3. Run Dreamweaver CS3 in Rosetta mode. In the Finder, browse to Applications/Adobe Dreamweaver CS3/Dreamweaver. Select the Dreamweaver application and choose File > Get Info. In the General section, select “Open using Rosetta”. ”

Run a Universal app on an Intel machine under Rosetta? I might be stretching things, but this seems an admission that Dreamweaver is Universal in name only.

I think this speaks to the larger concern I’ve felt and other developers may have felt–the former Macromedia’s products are being left to languish. CS3 Photoshop was a lightyear’s leap forward, but Dreamweaver and Fireworks were virtually untouched in looks, features and functionality.

So, I think this is news a lot of Mac developers and maybe the Mac community at large might be interested in. And perhaps running this story might help push Adobe to renew what seems like a waning commitment to its web development products. Panic’s Coda is looking more attractive by the hour.

Thanks for your time,
Jody Tate

The end. Or not. Really: Coda is sweet. Only thing holding me back so far is support for remote settings being directed to a locally mounted volume (doesn’t seem possible right now so far as I can see).