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.

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.