Dreamweaver CS3

The web-design community has been waiting for this release since Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia in 2006. As the two web-design tools are almost always employed together, Dreamweaver and Photoshop have a special relationship. And with the release of Creative Suite 3, that relationship has just got better.

Unlike the rest of the new Creative Suite, on the surface the Dreamweaver interface is relatively unchanged. There’s been some beefing up of CSS workflow and some new templates, which are useful and fluid. And you can move CSS snippets from inline to external documents using a context-sensitive menu.

There’s also the Adobe CSS Advisor, an online CSS bug repository that community users can contribute to. It’s accessible when you use the app’s overhauled Browser Compatibility Check feature, and can identify CSS problems and offer coding solutions.

Adobe-watchers will know that Spry has been available to users as a standalone AJAX library for the last year. But now it’s been integrated into Dreamweaver, bringing drag-and-drop UI widgets, XML data containers and inline effects along with it.

The big news is enhanced integration with Photoshop. There’s direct PSD import now, so you can retain the original image as source when you edit. You can also Copy an image area in Photoshop with the Marquee tool, switch to Dreamweaver and Paste it into your page, via an image optimisation dialog.