Best Practices

Visual authoring with XML data
Integrate XML-based data, such as RSS feeds into web pages using a simple drag and drop workflow. Jump to code view to customize the transformation, using improved code hinting for XML and XSLT.

New, unified CSS panel
All the CSS functionality is consolidated into one panel set and enhanced to make working with CSS easier and more productive. The new interface makes it easier to see the cascade of styles applied to a specific element and easily identify where attributes are defined. A property grid allows for quick edits.

CSS layout visualization
Apply visual aides at design time to outline CSS layout borders or color CSS layouts to reveal complex nesting schemes and improve selection. Click on the CSS layout for valuable Tooltips, such as ID and padding and margin and border settings.

Style rendering toolbar
View content the same way end-users will see it, no matter what the delivery mechanism, with new support for CSS media types in Dreamweaver 8. Use the style rendering toolbar to toggle to design view and see how it will look in print, on a handheld, or on a screen.

CSS rendering improvements
Match how complex CSS layouts will render in most browsers, with substantial improvements in design view accuracy. Dreamweaver now fully supports advanced CSS techniques, such as overflow, pseudo-elements, and form elements.

Accessibility: Support for WCAG/W3C priority 2 checkpoints
In addition to the integrated accessibility evaluation tool for Section 508 and WCAG Priority 1 checkpoints, Dreamweaver now supports both CSS and accessibility with an updated evaluation tool that includes WCAG Priority 2 checkpoints.

Improved WebDAV
WebDAV in Dreamweaver 8 now supports digest authentication and SSL for secure file transfer and offers improved connectivity with a wider array of servers.

Get more done
Background file transfer
Stop waiting and keep working while Dreamweaver 8 uploads files to the server. New functionality enables users to work with files in their local machine while Dreamweaver communicates with the server.

Zoom
Get great control over design with zoom. Pan in and inspect an image or work with a complex nested table layout. Zoom out to review how a page will look overall.

Guides
Compare the page layout to comps with pixel perfect accuracy using guides to measure page layouts. Great visual feedback helps measure distances accurately and supports intelligent snapping.

Coding toolbar
The new code toolbar surfaces common coding operations in a gutter bar along the side of the coding surface. No more hunting through menus and panels to find code snippets. New coding features include comment/uncomment.

Code collapse
Focus only on the code in use. Hide and expand blocks of code by selection or by tag to stay organized.

Workspace layouts
Customize and save workspace configurations. Dreamweaver 8 ships with four different configurations that are tailored to the needs of designers and coders. Pick and choose, or easily build a custom workspace.

Tabbed documents for the Mac
New document tabs on Mac help simplify the user interface and make it easier to select documents.

New starter pages
Get started with web design in a snap. Beautiful new layouts and designs allow users to go from installation to full site in no time flat.

Improved site synchronize and check in / check out
Manage sites with increased reliability and confidence. Improved site synchronization features help ensure that the file in use is the latest version. Prevent accidental overwriting of others’ work with improved check-in/ check-out functionality to track who is working on which files.

Compare files
Quickly compare files to identify what has changed, whether it is two local files, a file on the local and remote, or two files on the remote server. Dreamweaver 8 now integrates with diff utilities on both the Mac and Windows platforms.

Paste special
Spend less time wrestling content from email and Microsoft Word into formats. With new pasting options in Dreamweaver, retain all the source formatting created in Microsoft Word, or just take the text and apply the CSS already attached to the page.

Site relative references
Work seamlessly with server-side includes at design time and run time by ensuring that references are relative to sites instead of local files.

Code editing improvements
Gain greater control over how the tool hints and completes tags to fit with your coding style.

Latest technologies and standards
Support for ColdFusion MX 7
Updated support for ColdFusion MX 7 includes new server behaviors and code hinting. To match the code hinting and debugging with the correct version of ColdFusion, Dreamweaver automatically detects the server version the first time the tool connects to the site. The tight integration between Dreamweaver and ColdFusion allows users to add and remove databases directly from the database and components panel in Dreamweaver to show only CFCs defined in the current site—making navigating CFCs a snap.

Support for PHP 5
Take advantage of updated support for PHP 5, including server behaviors and code hinting.

Flash Video
Adding Flash Video to sites is drop dead simple. Add and customize the presentation of video on sites using an easy, five-click, dialog driven process.

Macromedia Web Publishing System: notification and event logging
Keep track of everything that is going on within your site. Events in Dreamweaver will notify the Macromedia Web Publishing System server so that all changes to a website in the WPS ecosystem are recorded.

Updated reference material from O’Reilly
New reference content for XML, XSLT, and XPath and updated content for ASP and JSP complements the already robust reference set in Dreamweaver. Work with the languages required for sites and applications.

Posted by Dablu as Applications at 8:36 AM PDT

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Microsoft will not include a new feature recently recognised as a security risk in the first release of its new operating system, Vista.

Last week, just days after a beta of Windows Vista was released, an Austrian hacker claimed to have devised a series of viruses that targeted the Monad command shell and could be used to disrupt a system.

However, Microsoft has since confirmed that it will not include the shell in the first public version of Vista, expected at the end of 2006.

The Monad Shell lets users access the operating system using text-based commands rather than the traditional Windows graphical user interface. In the past, Microsoft has said that Monad will be part of Longhorn, the code name for both the next client and server versions of Windows.

Monad is expected to be included in Windows over the next “three to five years,” though, according to Microsoft’s director of product management, Eric Bergsaid. “Our intention is to synchronise it with both client and server operating systems,” he said.

Security experts had worried that if Monad were to be included in a widely used client, it might become an attractive target for hackers, especially if the shell were to be enabled by default. Whether it will be enabled by default is unclear. “There are multiple ways that we could introduce this technology to the client stream,” Berg said.

The first Microsoft product to use Monad will be the next release of Microsoft’s Exchange messaging server, codenamed Exchange 12, which is due in 2006. Monad is then expected to be included in the Windows Server “Longhorn”, expected in 2007, and then could be available in a future Windows Vista release, said Rob Helm, director of research with Directions on Microsoft. “Presumably, as time goes on, all of Microsoft’s products will have Monad scripting interfaces,” he said.

Posted by Dablu as Operating Systems at 4:54 PM PDT

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Start saving your pennies, Web designers! Macromedia today announced the upcoming release of all-new versions of its flagship products: Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, and Fireworks 8. True to form, it will also bundle these together with previously-available Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2 in Macromedia Studio 8. Thanks to a generous upgrade pricing policy, first-time Macromedia users can get a really good deal with this release.

In Dreamweaver 8, the key focus of the new version is improved support for CSS-based design. Macromedia has revamped the CSS Styles panel to better visualize the rules and properties that have been applied to the selected element of the document, and add new properties to those existing rules. CSS-savvy designers can switch on a mode that lists each of the rules that applies to the selected element, in the order they cascade.

The WYSIWYG view has also gotten some additional attention in this release. It now clearly shows the padding and margin applied to the selected element with crosshatching, further assisting you in visualizing CSS layouts that rely heavily on these features.

Although Macromedia is touting significantly improved WYSIWYG rendering in this release, certain CSS layout features will still give it some trouble. As of Beta 2, for example, the use of CSS fixed positioning, even if hacked to work in Internet Explorer 6, screws up Dreamweaver’s display, interpreting position: fixed as position: static instead of ignoring the property definition as a browser would (or treating it as position: absolute the way IE does). This may or may not be fixed for the final release, but in general I’d say Dreamweaver 8’s WYSIWYG view is good enough to do anything CSS can do in today’s browsers without hacks.

When I asked her about the WYSIWYG rendering improvements, Dreamweaver Product Manager Jen Taylor said Macromedia “focused heavily on rendering in this release, dedicating an entire developer to nothing but rendering improvement. The goal of our rendering surface is to render to how most users will experience the page, which, until recently, has been IE. For this release, we began the process of transitioning to a more standard compliant rendering surface.” But she acknowledges that WYSIWYG rendering still isn’t perfectly compliant. “Neither we nor the browsers have gotten there. Rendering is a tricky thing because different browsers render things differently. We can’t get to pixel perfect because no browser does. But, we try.”

Dreamweaver 8 also includes visual authoring of XSLT transformations to display dynamic XML data (such as RSS feeds) either as a Web page, or embedded within another Web page. Dreamweaver 8 includes tools for both client-side and (more powerfully) server-side XSL Transformations. This is an impressive addition to the program, which risks going undiscovered by designers who are not necessarily XML-savvy.

Other nice improvements to the software include direct importing of Flash Video (FLV) files, support of updated server platforms such as ColdFusion MX 7 and PHP 5, the ability to zoom and set guides in the WYSIWYG display, a new coding toolbar, code folding support, and–my personal favourite–background file transfers.

Though Macromedia is touting this as the most significant update to Dreamweaver in the product’s history, I personally see it as just another natural evolutionary step.

Flash Professional 8 has received similarly extensive updates in this release, not least of which is authoring support for the dazzling array of new goodies supported by Flash Player 8 (which I discussed in a recent issue of the Tech Times). In addition to these many new authoring features and effects, Flash 8 sports a new, improved video codec, greatly improved performance on Mac OS X, and an optional ‘Illustrator/Freehand mode’ for its drawing tools.

Though not as extensive as the changes to its bigger brothers, the updates in Fireworks 8 are equally welcome. Better support for building CSS-based menus, as well as some fifteen new blend modes top the list.

Notably absent for the first time from this edition of Macromedia Studio is the company’s vector drawing product, Freehand. Though the company line is that Macromedia continues to support and see success with the existing version of Freehand, the product’s days are clearly numbered in the face of Macromedia’s imminent acquisition by rival Adobe, whose Illustrator product is more widely used and is considered the industry standard.

Instead of Freehand, Macromedia will bundle in Studio 8 the existing versions of its other Web design products, Contribute and FlashPaper. Contribute provides a friendly interface for non-technical users to edit the static HTML portions of a website without breaking its design. FlashPaper lets you convert any document to a Flash movie that can be embedded in a Web page for viewing and printing, like a more lightweight and Web-friendly version of Adobe PDF.

It should be noted that the bundled licenses of both these products are for use on the same computer as the rest of the Studio, so you can’t, for example, buy Studio 8 and give Contribute to your boss to update the corporate Website while you do the heavier design work in Dreamweaver. Your boss will need his own copy of Contribute to do that.

Aside from all the other nice stuff you’ll find in Studio 8, its pricing is worthy of particular note. For the first time, Macromedia is offering a single upgrade price for Studio 8 of US$399, which lets you upgrade from any prior version of the studio or one of its component products to the full Studio 8 (which now includes Flash Professional). So if you don’t already have one of these products, it would be worth checking eBay now for a cheap, legitimate copy of, say, Flash 3. You could probably find it for less than $20, but having that serial number will mean you’ll only need to pay the upgrade price of US$399 for Studio 8, not the full price of US$999.

Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8 and Macromedia Studio 8 will be available in September. Contribute 3, FlashPaper 2 and Freehand MX are available now.

Posted by Dablu as Applications at 4:52 PM PDT

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Google is refusing to speak to journalists from CNet after the US news website published personal information about Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Ironically, the information was not gleaned by any underhand methods but by searching the Internet, using Google.

However Google has decided to ignore the website’s reporters for a year.

The offending report gave details of Schmidt’s earnings, his wife’s name, where he lives, a political donation and his hobbies, all by spending 30 minutes with the search engine.

The article was written to illustrate just how much personal information Google stores about millions of individuals.

Posted by Dablu as Search Engines at 4:51 PM PDT

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