Davin's blog Occassional posts on user experience design, faith, and family.

19Apr/050

Oh, and how about major merger?

In case you hadn't heard already, Macromedia is being bought by Adobe. This is a huge deal, especially for the web industry. (Read about it at CNET.com)

Me, I'm not pleased to hear it. I sort of like having them compete for market share. Keeps prices down. Increases innovation.

What I hear is that Adobe is poised to be a more head-on competitor to Microsoft. That sounds crazy, as an industry insider, at least as far as off-the-shelf software goes. I'd buy web development software from Adobe or Macromedia before I'd touch any web development software from Microsoft--at least for front-end work.

I've viewed Microsoft FrontPage as a breaker of the Garbage In-Garbage Out rule of computing. With FrontPage, you can put awesome code in, and then it gets transformed by M$ FrontPage's mandatory eatShit&&Die filter, and then you get Garbage Out. Incidentally, I'm pretty sure they use the same filter when saving Word documents as web pages.

Ooookay, didn't mean to rant.

16Jul/040

Indenting blocks of code in Dreamweaver

Code indentation in Dreamweaver

Code indentation in Dreamweaver

It is nice when you discover something new and useful in a piece of software you've been using for years.

For instance, this past week I discovered that in the Code View in Dreamweaver MX, you can highlight a big block of code and tab the whole thing to the right, uniformly, by pressing TAB. You can also take away tab indents by pressing SHIFT+TAB.

Of course, hindsight 20/20 and all, this seems a perfectly reasonable feature. I just didn't know it. So now I do. And, I've already used it half-a-dozen times.

It's helpful when you move a whole block of code to a new location, and you want to adjust it's indentation to fit the new surrounding code.

18Apr/030

Frontpage vs Dreamweaver

For you web builders out there, here is one web builder's comparison of FrontPage and Dreamweaver.