insert clever quip about ubiquity here

i’m a “web developer” and i use dreamweaver every day. it’s like the hammer and screwdriver of my trade all rolled into one.
however, it crashes on me quite regularly. that’s frustrating, but i ask a lot from it, and i can’t complain too badly at the occasional collapse. on occasion – sometimes as often as twice a month, it crashes so badly that i have to reinstall the program. doing so often destroys all my personal settings and the layout i have set up for the application.
macromedia has been producing Dreamweaver for 7 years now, and i’ve been using it since version 2. i like the interface and the tools that macromedia has put at the developer’s disposal.
however, all the good parts of the program are heavily outweighted by my monthly, or bi-monthly reinstallation and setup. That’s about 1-2 hours of my day, and it most often occurs during my busiest time of the week. murphy’s law and all that.
i would think that after 7 versions have been produced they would be able to produce a robust application. some of you may be thinking that it’s not possible – but i use bbedit on my macintosh for HTML development, and to my knowledge it has never – not once – crashed on me. it’s a complex application with FTP and SFTP built in, but it’s robust.
now granted, bbedit is up to version 8, but i don’t think it’s too much to ask that a product that i’ve spent over a thousand dollars on – doesn’t suck.
i’ve got all the patches, i’ve read and posted on all the forums, but still haven’t found any solution to this problem.
this month i had an additional quirk thrown into the mix. dreamweaver crapped out, wouldn’t get past the splash screen, so i had to reinstall. the first step in that process is to uninstall the application. i popped open my windows uninstall utitlity and selected dreamweaver – a process i’m quite familiar with, and hit uninstall. about 1/5th of the way through i got the catastrophic failure above.
now i know you tech-heads out there are going to tsk-tsk me and say i should have uninstalled my components first. however, dreamweaver is so flakey for me, and i reinstall so often, i don’t use any. or snippets, or any other of the good features of dreamweaver – as the application requires such constant refurbishing.
so i had to uninstall and restart my computer about 5 times before i could finally rid myself of the buggy version, and install a fresh copy. then i had to go about setting up my preferences and getting back to client work.
so after 3 hours of wasted time, i’ve decided that at the first available opportunity, i’m going to “switch back” to mac, and use bbedit, cssedit and fugu, and be a lot happier.
now i just have to save my pennies for a new mac.
Categories: code / web |
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— BrockSky Nov 25, 02:46 pm #
i’m tired of Dreamweaver. It doesn’t do anything for me that I can’t do better in other applications. and i’ve never liked Fireworks much.
— paul Nov 25, 03:56 pm #
Despite the fact that it’s just painfully slow (lately I haven’t been using MX, just BBEdit), iirc I’ve never had Dreamweaver MX crash either pre or post patching.
We have MX 2K4 @ work, and I like it, it’s fast, and only crashes once or twice a week. :-P
It’s just infrequent enough that I juuuuust forget the “save and save often” rule, and end up cursing and rebuilding.
In fact, lately Flash MX has been the bane of my existence. Frequently blowing up FLA’s and refusing to save (even “Save As”, which would preserve my work).
I’m not entirely sure if it’s MACR’s fault, MSFT or DELL to be honest. I think the whole lot of them need to Go Away.
I’m just happy at the end of a day of working (sic) on my PC, I can come home and get a couple productive hrs in on my baby…
— Chris George Nov 27, 06:34 pm #
Very bizzare. I have often had to reinstall Dreamweaver and then lately I got the ‘Catastrophic Error’ thing.
Quite annoying.
Tj
— Tj Aug 9, 12:20 am #