ARRRGGGHHH!!! OMFG MX 2004 interface covered in more bugs than ever!
<rant>I am literally agog. Simply agog I say! I can't freakin' believe that Macromedia has surpassed even their own best (worst?) at creating the buggiest interface yet. In the incredibly short period of time I have been using the 2004 demo, I have already had these lovelies appear:
? document windows that sometimes float OVER the palettes,
? inconsistent behavior when using function keys to bring up palettes (sometimes hitting f8 again won't make the site window disappear - sometimes it wouldn't bring it up at all)
? at one point I dragged two files to the remote server in the site window yet only 1 was uploaded
? this one freakin' kills me $^$%@#)($*@: scroll the site window down and open a document. now click back in the site window, and it jump up to the top (so if you try to immediately double click open another file, you get the wrong one).
? inconsistent rendering bugs in the docked palettes - I have opened them to see things fine, and opened them at times and seen blank space and garbage.
All of these craptacular behaviors seem to come and go - but these are just a few of the things I have noticed in my fifteen minutes using it.
Then I opened up a Fireworks file of mine just to see the "supercharged performance" for myself, and I have to admit that if "supercharged performance" means dipping your computer in molasses, then their marketing droids are right on the money. Moving a simple box around my image is so slow it only gets rendered every 15 or 20 pixels apart - like designing underwater. If you click from one object to another which requires a property palette change, it takes 2-4 seconds for the inspector to update. WAY slower than MX.
YMMV of course, maybe I should reboot this damn thing and see what happens. Just for reference I am on a footlong PB. I have no idea why I ever though Macromedia would change - I guess I just had high hopes that some of the outstanding bugs from the last interface might have been addressed. Instead, they seem to have prettied things up while adding even more bugs. Bravo Macromedia, bravo. Way to be consistent if nothing else.
</rant>
Comments
BBEdit
Not to mention it is sluggish on the dual xeon 2ghz i have at work and on a g5!
Originally posted by kim kap sol
It's sad that Macromedia is so shitty now (were they always like this?)
Hmmm, well I would say no. The thing that kills me is they make fantastic products from the standpoint of features. They make the most useful web products on the market IMHO - fireworks has no equal when it comes to web graphics. They have always been pretty notorious for software that has non-show stopping bugs which you just learn to live with because there is nothing better to get the job done (yeah yeah I have used BBEdit - hell DW even comes bundled with it).
When they moved the suite to OS X I figured there would be some performance issues - teething issues getting things going in the new OS. But with 2004 they really seem to have taken a huge step backwards in regards to what really matters in their products - the huge performance problems, and the little niggling things like I mentioned above which don't make the product unusable, just a pain in the arse. And by the performance I have seen so far, it is such a huge step backwards, I almost think you would need a G5 to feel even somewhat comfortable working in MX 2004 daily. Try hitting the maximize site window button - watch how long it takes to pull that palette out of the nested palettes and make it a separate one. On my footlong it gives me the SCOD and literally takes over 5 seconds. Amazing.
The thing that sucks is this isn't a beta. This is the real deal - Macromedia saying this software is so good you want to spend $399 to upgrade your existing install. Yeah. I have seen a few neat features (haven't used Flash yet), but considering the performance hit I can't see ANYone upgrading unless they have the newest of new hardware. I had thought it would be a Mac specific thing, but hearing it is sluggish on a Dual 2GHz Xeon - that shows bad coding all around. Come on MM - WTF?!?!?!
Does anyone use GoLive instead of Dreamweaver? Thoughts about switching?
I have been using Dreamweaver since version 3, and Fireworks since version 4. I currently run DW MX and FW 4 on a 266MHz beige G3 running OS 9.2.2 at home, and DW MX and FW MX on a 864MHz MDD G4 at work.
I have had none of the problems you people are talking about. Granted, The Pie Man said my milage may vary, but how can it be that bad for all of you and running perfectly fine for me?
It's not that I've gotten used to the bugs because there is nothing better like The Pie Man suggests, because I can honestly not think of a single bug that I have ever expereinced.
I'll admit that I have issues with DW MX, but they are issues with the feature set, and like a good customer, I communicated my desires to Macromedia. Whether they were included in MX 2004, I don't know. But when it comes down to it, the only two companies who make software that I inherently trust are Apple and Macromedia.
As far as I'm concerned, they should keep up their (consistantly) good work.
Flame away.
edit: spelling and grammatical issues
Picked up a copy of GoLive a few months ago and have come to enjoy it as a decent replacement. Site Organization sucks with it, but other then that I like it. Still use both depending on what needs to be done, DW tends to be better with complex tables. But out of all of them BBEdit and RBrowser (FTP/SSH) are used the most.
Originally posted by Gamrin
The problems you bring up have existed for me in multiple versions of Dreamweaver, as well.
they have also existed for me in dreamweaver mx, but here's an idea: delete any and all dreamweaver prefernecs from your machine and restart. mind you, it will erase any predefined sites you have, so retain a copy of those preferences and where they go.
if you go through with it, let me know if any of your problems fix themselves. removing those prefs cured many problems with mx for me, but unfortunately, would usually come back over time. if you installed an update OVER an old mx install, it wouldn't surprise me that many of the problems may have made the transition, too.
The funny thing is that I *have* deleted the preferences from DW and restarted. In fact, I did this on two diffferent computers, my 500 MHz cube, and an 867 MHz G4 tower in the folklore department of the college I teach at. I had the same problems on both computers before and after tossing the preferences. MX, on both computers, was installed "clean," not over an earlier version.
Maybe the problem is my setup, but I don't run third party OS enhancements or anything that might kludge up my computer. It's really strange and terribly annoying. DW literally slows my computer down when it's running, even when it's in the background, hidden, and unused for hours. So, I'm desperate to try something new with a not too terrible learning curve.
In an earlier thread somewhere, someone mentioned that they wished Apple would take a stab at writing a web layout program similar in scope to the other iApps. Every time I fire up DW to update my company's site, I get that thought, myself. It would be nice to see an intuitive user interface on my website authoring app for a change.
When I saw these new versions down the pipe I was very excited. No more classic support X all the way. Some great new features, and Fireworks touting speed enhancements. I was ready to plunk down my cash, now that I have tried it I am keeping my cash in my pocket.
For one the new UIs on both DW and FW are horribly clunky feeling, whats with these damn ugly icons? and the drawing errors on popup list boxes? DW 04 seems like a downgrade in my book. The same bugs that annoyed my in MX are still there, the specific one being dragging and dropping test or graphics around a complex page causes the page to scroll to the top or bottom...very annoying. Opening pages from the site window is still slow, and the windows still snap to screen edges and other strange areas. Windows still get stuck in and out of focus. and General UI performance is terrible.
The big one for me is the UI, it seems really distracting. This is a pro app?!? What with all the colorful buttons?! The code/design/split changer looks like its from 10.0 and is huge. I'm just not impressed.
For serious code monkies, you'd only use BBEdit anyway but between the two WYSIWYG editors, I'll take GoLive anyday over the new MX Macromedia apps. Granted, the spellchecker is worthless, but at least the interface behaves as expected. The bottom line I can find my way around pretty easily and customize things in a more intuitive way (screen tabs, standard Adobe palette structuring, etc).
GoLive certainly doesn't lack for functionality unless you're a ColdFusion geek or something.
Originally posted by tonton
I just can't adapt to using the reduced feature set of Adobe Illustrator.
What feature(s) is/are missing in Illustrator?
Then there's the crap colour picker and retarded colour palettes ...
So I'm just stuck here waiting for the neato tools they have on FH to make their way into Illustrator.
Originally posted by Gamrin
The problems you bring up have existed for me in multiple versions of Dreamweaver, as well. I haven't bought the new version because, quite literally, the one I have now is freakin' terrible. Don't get me wrong, DW lets me do what I need to do as far as laying out a basic website (I don't write code), but it's terribly unintuitive, buggy, and it somehow slows down my entire system (running 10.2.6). Sigh.
Does anyone use GoLive instead of Dreamweaver? Thoughts about switching?
I have plain Studio MX (not 2004), and it's nothing short of brilliant, in my opinion. So it would seem like 2004 would kick ass, but it looks like it doesn't.
Hmm...maybe only the Mac version sucks? Or is the PC version sucking just as badly? Anyone know?
Originally posted by tonton
But most important to me is FreeHand. I damn well hope the next version works all right. I've used Freehand 10 extensively but not MX. 10 was not that bad, despite all the flak it got. And MX is better, right?
Right. I've been using Freehand since it was owned by Aldus, and Freehand 10 almost made me switch over completely to Illustrator (Like LoCash, I use both).
Freehand MX still has a few quirks, but compared to the trainwreck that was 10...MX is downright dreamy.
If you like 10, you will LOVE MX.