infoTECH Feature

October 28, 2011

A Look at Adobe Creative Suite 5 and 5.5, Part Two: Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks

In Part One of this three-part series on Adobe’s (News - Alert) Creative Suite, we looked at the suite as a whole. Now in Part Two, we’ll narrow the focus to Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks.

Dreamweaver CS5/5.5

As the suite’s web design software, Dreamweaver is the one product I use the most heavily. Version 5.0 offers a variety of helpful features, especially ones that help you better see how your page will look in a live browser. The Live View feature lets you preview your page within Dreamweaver as it would appear on the Web. The Adobe BrowserLab feature takes that one step further by letting you preview your web content either by defining it as part of a local site or by viewing it on a remote server.

The new browser navigation toolbar makes it easier to browse multi-page websites by offering back, forward, home, refresh buttons, and a URL field. This feature comes in especially handy when used in Live View mode as you can open each new page on your site by clicking one link after another. You’ll now find it simpler to set up a site as well, both locally and remotely. You can set and see remote and test servers in one view to keep track of both at the same time.

Since I often hand code CSS (News - Alert), I appreciate the new support for CSS in Dreamweaver 5. The latest version adds more starter templates for various CSS layouts that you can set up as part of a new, blank HTML page. You can also disable different CSS properties as a way of commenting them out without deleting them to see how your HTML code is affected. Finally, a CSS inspection mode lets you identify and view certain CSS properties in your content without have to go through the actual code.

The latest 5.5 upgrade for Dreamweaver now fully supports HTML5 and CSS3. Integration with PhoneGap lets you create apps for iPhone, iPad, Android devices, and BlackBerry (News - Alert) phones. With a further nod toward mobile devices, the upgrade allows you to see how your site looks on different platforms, including traditional desktop, tablet, and smartphone. Using the multiscreen preview panel, you can check out your Web site as it would appear on multiple devices and browsers all in one shot.

Dreamweaver CS5.5 also offers the new jQuery Mobile framework, which makes it easier to design content for a mobile interface.

Flash Professional CS5/5.5

Flash Professional, of course, lets you create animations, videos, and other projects that can be embedded into your Web pages.

Version 5 added some helpful new features specifically for designers who work with video. You can preview an imported video directly on the stage area of Flash and tweak its settings right then and there. Flash users will find it easier to add cue points along their video timelines. Plus, you can access the Properties panel to change certain settings for your video, such as its skin, size, and alignment. A new text layout engine gives you more control over how your text flows and how you can adjust various properties to modify it. In particular, you can now control your text as you would in a print document, with such options as kerning, leading, and superscript.

Beyond the standard FLA format, you can save your Flash files in a new format known as XFL, either compressed or uncompressed. This basically separates the Flash file into individual assets and XML files with information about the file. The benefit here is that you can see all the separate assets and other components that make up your file so that you can easily access any of them. This also comes in handy if you’re working with other colleagues on a Flash presentation as each person can see and work with all of the elements of the file.

Those of you not familiar with Flash’s ActionScript programming language can grab code from a Code Snippets panel to create certain common features and interactions. Adobe has also added new starter templates to Flash for animation, banners, and other types of content. Some of the new templates are especially helpful for people who don’t know how to code in ActionScript.

If you need a helping hand in Flash, you can tap into the Community Help feature on adobe.com. This lets you dive into online forums and other support resources that can provide information or answers on anything Flash related.

The 5.5 update includes support for the new world of tablets and mobile devices.

You can now scale your content to see how it would look on devices of different screen sizes and resolutions. Just as helpful, if you change the size of the stage, you can set up your content to automatically scale to the new stage size. The Code Snippets panel now offers snippets geared toward mobile devices. Flash 5.5 also helps you better share assets and actual code among different projects.

A couple of new features prove helpful when working with graphic files. You can now export vector-based symbols into bitmap images when you publish your Flash presentation. Adobe sees this as a useful option when publishing files for mobile devices as it puts less strain on the PC. You can also create a bitmap image from any symbol in your library and then use that image for other projects, especially ones designed for mobile devices.

Adobe has also enhanced Flash’s overall interface. You can preview any ActionScript code and a description of any code snippet before you bring it into your project. The Project panel has been redesigned so that you can more easily work with and manage multiple projects at the same time. One improvement that I found helpful is that the Library panel will now warn you if try to import symbols with the same name, giving you the option to put the new item into a different folder.

Fireworks CS5/5.1

Next to Dreamweaver, Fireworks is my second favorite program, as I often use it to modify graphics for Web sites quickly and easily. Though not nearly as full featured as Photoshop, Fireworks is an ideal application for those of you who do work with images destined for the Web.

Version 5 included some tweaks to the Properties panel, allowing you to resize vector-based graphics more quickly and exactly and work with gradients for your images and content. Adobe has also added an enhancement called pixel precision, which makes your overall designs looked sharper and allows you to adjust and fix any elements that don’t appear on a whole pixel.

With a nod toward the mobile world, the Adobe Device Central feature offers profiles for various mobile devices that let you create a project by using an automated workflow. This way your project automatically starts off with the right screen size and resolution. You can then preview your project as it would look on various mobile platforms. Beyond the ones that come with the software, you can also create your own customized profiles.

Adobe says that Fireworks 5.0 also offers better performance and improved stability. Though I couldn’t accurately gauge how true this was, the software did seem a bit snappier than the prior version.

Since Fireworks 5.1 is a minor update, users won’t find much that’s new in the latest version. According to Adobe, 5.1 mostly offers a series of bug fixes over the prior edition. But one notable improvement reduces the color banding on certain GIF, PNG, and JPG files by bumping up the color optimization. I’ve run into this issue myself with color banding of specific images, and it’s always been a hassle to fix in prior versions. So this enhancement alone is welcome news. But if you’re currently running Fireworks 5.0 as a standalone product, you’re probably best staying put and waiting for 6.0 to launch next year.

Those are some glimpses into the latest versions of Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks. Stayed tuned for part three of this series where we look at Photoshop, Ilustrator, and InDesign.


Lance Whitney is a journalist, IT consultant, and Web Developer with almost 20 years of experience in the IT world. To read more of Lance's articles, please visit his columnist page

Edited by Rich Steeves
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