Dreamweaver MX 2004

I know I'm way behind the crowd here in finally getting Dreamweaver MX 2004. Thing is, I downloaded and installed it ages ago, looked at it briefly precisely twice in the 30-day trial period; uninstalling it apparently left traces on my production computer, so I was never able to really get a good look at it. Desire prevailed, however, and so I bought it yesterday. (Still had to switch to Firefox, though, since Macromedia's Web Standards-compliant site still kicks Opera to a browser upgrade page).

Nonetheless, having installed DreamweaverMX 2004 and played around with it a bit (okay, I'm now using it almost for everything), I can say a few things:

(1) Dreamweaver MX 2004 is NOT slow, despite what I'd read on Macromedia's DW newsgroup. Not on my machine, anyway — a P4 with a Gig of memory. Slightly slower at startup than Dreamweaver 4, but that's to be expected, and well below what one might expect from such a powerful program.

(2) DWMX2004 can work with DW4 templates. This is a relief, as DW's Templates feature is a huge timesaver. I'd guess that converting sites to DWMX2004 Templates would be better, though — but it's good to know that that isn't an immediate issue.

(3) You can still run Dreamweaver4 although not, apparently, at the same time.

(4) Coding hints. DWMX2004 has implemented HomeSite's coding hints and code-closing feature (you start typing tags; DW gives you a choice of tags; selecting pops the tag into your code). This is terrific — while I can and do also hand-code, I don't really feel like typing *every* angle bracket and tag. Fast is good.

There are lots of little goodies, but I'll say this: I'm all smiles.