Page 1 of 3 Macromedia faced strong criticism last September when it released Dreamweaver MX 2004. Many long-time users complained of poor performance and decided against upgrading from the MX version. If you're in that camp, take heart. Macromedia listened. Released just last night, the Dreamweaver MX 2004 Updater is a significant improvement over last September's release. While no one is saying there's no room remaining for improvement, many of the beta testers agree:
"I think that much has been done to improve DW and make it once again something that I will use more."
"I believe we have a better version, and I believe that the Macromedia team is doing good work."
"The Dreamweaver MX 2004 updater appears to perform better. I have yet to experience any real symptoms of memory leaks or other similar problems, and have given Find/Replace a serious workout."
"The Dreamweaver MX 2004 updater has been a significant improvement, even though there are things that could be better, the performance is radically better. I appreciate Macromedia's hard work at working to improve DWMX 2004 and make it a very usable product."
"Other problems that slowed down the production flow have been resolved as well, such as the cursor delay while editing long texts, or the marked sluggishness that was characteristic of the release version. I think that Macromedia has done a good job of solving some of the most glaring bugs that were slowing down production for the **majority** of DW 2004 users."
You can read all about the facts and figures of the updater on the Macromedia web site. Instead of tediously listing all of the big fixes again, I decided to get a more personal perspective from the Dreamweaver engineers themselves. Who better than the worker bees to tell us why we should load this updater? So, without further ado, here are the answers from the people actually responsible for the improvements we're all going to enjoy using.
A team of Dreamweaver engineers were assigned the task of tracking down and fixing the problems at the heart of our performance complaints. Leading the team was John Albano, a Principal Software Engineer on the Dreamweaver team. Also contributing to the effort:
Plus several others, too numerous to mention. Suffice it to say, Macromedia took the effort seriously.
I asked these guys to give us some insight into the process. I wanted to get a more personal look into what went into this release, beyond what we can all get by reading the release notes. I particularly appreciated their insights into how we can speed up Dreamweaver with more judicious settings in the Preferences dialog.
Keywords
Dreamweaver MX 2004 Updater, performance, interview
