Adobe Should Be Ashamed

[Girheim]

Just as the title says. I'm not "hating" and I'm not some kid who thinks life is a free ride.

I recently tried Dreamweaver as my top choice for a web development platform with high hopes from a name I have trusted like Adobe and was fairly disappointed. I really wanted to love it, and it had a few things I really did love. But... Dreamweaver lacks features which should be standard in "traditional" style web builders in 2020, such as drag and drop functionality, as well as far more CSS design features than the half-baked setup Dreamweaver offers. Instead of purchasing a subscription of $20/mo for Dreamweaver, I bought a $50 license for Pinegrow.

Web development software like Pinegrow have far outpaced Dreamweaver in every way.

So, thing is... shame on Adobe for charging $20/mo for a glorified text editor and half-baked CSS designer. You have done nothing innovative for the field in the last 20 years. You can't even compete with indie-developers. You could be the top of the line, best of the best, but instead your software remains mediocre and your competition blows you out of the water and you want to charge premium prices. Now I realize this is harsh, and if I am wrong here and someone wants to prove me wrong, I am perfectly willing to admit my fault.

I don't write this as a "hate" post towards Adobe or Dreamweaver. I write it to say, get your rear in gear! Dreamweaver is 10-20 years behind. If I want to code my own website, I would get Notepad++ or any of the freely available text editors with all sorts of coding functionality and not pay Adobe $20/mo for a text editor I can get for free. And the CSS designer? I can code CSS myself. The functionality you offer is not worth $20/mo.

TLDR; Dreamweaver could be the best of the best, but Adobe doesn't really bring anything innovative to the field and hasn't for the last 20 years, and other web development software far outpaces them for much more reasonable prices.

Sorry. Just how it is.

[pziecina]

You are not saying anything that many others have said.

When I suggested that Dw was not worth more than $5 per month, I was told by many, that if I did not like Dw to leave. Adobe is NOT interested in web development, (then again, I do not consider Pinegrow as a serious web development program) and many of its 'attempts' to make a more visual web site creation tool, are a joke to anyone serious about the profession.

The question one has to ask though, (which I don't think even Adobe, or the Dw team know) is - 'who is the target audiance for Dw'?

[WolfShade]

Just gotta add my two cents, here.

On the one hand, all your rant says is that you don't want to learn actual coding, you want a drag-n-drop _everything_ IDE.  That's not web development, that's an IDE that mimics online web designers like Wix.  Something that _anyone_ can use, blindfolded.  Many, if not most, of us have spent years dedicating ourselves to coding.  Learning everything from the inside out.  We have no use for anything like what you want in an IDE.  So, as the question was already asked, does Adobe know their target demographic?  What is their target demographic?  Coders?  Or WYSIWYG designers?  No one knows, apparently.

On the other hand, I hear ya.  And as pziecina has stated, you are _not_ alone.  Many of us are at least as frustrated, if not more.  I can point you to (if I can find it) a Tracker comment thread where I have repeatedly pointed out a failure on the part of Adobe that was met with nothing but excuses and (invalid) reasons why it should stay as is.  It was started years ago, and _STILL_ no one has addressed the issue.  And I doubt it ever will be corrected.

I've been trying for over a year to get Lucee on the approved list of applications we can use, just to get away from Adobe ColdFusion.  I'm going to keep working on it until it becomes a reality.  Because I'm that frustrated with Adobe.

V/r,

^ _ ^

[pziecina]

No matter how many times I read such posts, (and I do wish the Dw/Adobe team would 'get their fingers out of their ears) I cannot help wondering, how many people who install the Adobes Premier pro program would expect to go pass themselves off as 'professional film editors'.

Given the number of people who expect to create web sites, (Adobe CC users) without any knowledge of code, it should be all of them.

[Nancy OShea]

"I cannot help wondering, how many people who install the Adobes Premier pro program would expect to go pass themselves off as 'professional film editors'."

PZ,

Interestingly, I know quite a few movie & TV industry pros who moved to Premier Pro after years of struggles with Avid and Final Cut Pro.  So it has a good industry reputation here in California.  But I get what you're saying in that using PP doesn't make one a "professional editor" any more than fancy cameras make one a "professional photographer." 

It's no different in web development.  Tools don't make websites.  People do.  The tools we use (Dreamweaver, Animate, Pinegrow, VS Code or whatever) are merely a means to an end. 

"Dreamweaver lacks features which should be standard in "traditional" style web builders in 2020, such as drag and drop functionality..."

Girheim,

I admit, so-called "drag & drop" web design is appealing on the surface but we pay for that ease-of-use in other ways -- most notably limited features, lack of code or garbage code that's impossible to work with.  Just ask users of Muse and XD about that.

"Dreamweaver could be the best of the best..."

I think the holy grail notion that a single tool or platform can do everything and do it well is beyond reach at this time.  They all have their pros and cons.  Talented developers use different tools and adapt to new workflows as needed. 

DW is not perfect by any stretch but it excels at site management.  I also like code hints and auto code-completion.  I hate Designer Panels, Real-Time Preview & File Syncing thus never use them.  Even so, rarely a day goes by that I don't have DW open alongside other tools of my trade. 

Just my 5 cents.

[Girheim]

"On the one hand, all your rant says is that you don't want to learn actual coding, you want a drag-n-drop _everything_ IDE."

Learn actual coding? I believe I mentioned it in my original post, but let me reiterate. I can code a website by hand in Notepad without issue.

Why is Adobe charging $20/mo for Notepad functionality?

The purpose of website builders is, and always has been, convenience. I don't use them to replace coding skills, I use them because I don't need to reinvent the wheel every time I build a website and prove to anyone that I can code in the simplest of languages like HTML or CSS.

What functionality does Dreamweaver provide specifically that Adobe (or any of their customers) feels is worth a $20/mo subscription?

[osgood_]

Use it or lose it. The more you become dependent on automation the less capable you become as a developer. I wonder how many 'developers' could actually write a doctype declaration without emmet.........not many would be my guess.

The only exceptional feature these days in DW is its file tree management. Not many editors have the ability to drag and drop files in the file tree which can update all the links automatically. It has a good workflow for snippet creation whereas free editors like VS Code and Atom use json files, just a huge joke to be honest as you manually have to code the json snippet - anyone who has worked directly with json files knows how unmanagable that can be.

Maybe when DW gets its server behaviours back (which made it a unique product) then it will be worth the $20 a month but its been a long, long, long wait and still waiting.

[osgood_]

Dreamweaver is an editor for coders but is behind the curve. Its not a drag and drop environment which amatuers seek. Is it worth $20 a month, not when you compare it to the free competitors. Its a ruderless ship and has been for many years. Coders dont use it because they have access to more advanced free editors or cheaper ones and amatuers dont use it because its not drag and drop. I think its being propped up by either those that are happy to pay $20 a month for their 'favourite' code editor or those that know nothing. $240 a year is cheap if you are one of the minority professsional coders who use it to create websites for clients on a regular basis but if you build the one off website, an amatuer user, then its not really a good financial option. Pinegrows one time payment would be the better fit.

The whole industry has been completely F****D since it was opened up to the amatuer by way of drag, drop, snap and pop solutions. You've got clueless amatuer developers of programmes whose market is clueless amatuer users. I get why Adobe doesnt want to invest money in DW any longer because the market is saturated. The little financial returns it would get doesnt make it viable

[pziecina]

Sort of agree Os.

I do think that there could be a more 'visual' method of layout etc., but I also think that to do so would require the user to know what they are doing in html/css/js in order to do so.

css designer sort of 'got it right', but it also demonstrates, 'how to get it wrong', and don't even get me started on the Dws team not keeping it up to date.

Its the same with html. One could 'lay out' the html semantic layout visually, but only if one knows what they are doing.

As for js. The old 'actionscript' panel for Flash, could (or maybe that should be should) have been adapted to js coding, especially when it comes to the html canvas element.