I don’t use Dreamweaver much, I have to say. When I’m developing I’m either working in Flash (using Flex Builder, Flash IDE or FlashDevelop) or I’m doing work with HTML/CSS/JavaScript or PHP, in which case I use Panic’s excellent Coda. Why don’t I use Dreamweaver? Well, I think I’ve always thought of it as a bit of a clumsy giant - it is a massive, richly featured application that  has traditionally generated fairly bloated HTML, something which I loathe. It has a ‘Design’ view that differs in output from a standards compliant browser (and that’s what I really need). And as far as managing a remote site is concerned, I’ve just never really thought it could cut it as an FTP client, when we have FileZilla on Windows, and Transmit and Coda on the Mac.

One thing that I have seen people using Dreamweaver for is text search over multiple files.  And believe me, I have seen a lot of people using it for that, and ONLY that. Imagine, a tool so big and powerful, yet there are developers who crack it open just to do a text search! I don’t think Adobe are going to start marketing Dreamweaver as ‘the worlds most powerful multiple-file search appliance’, so what have they given us with this new version that might make Dreamweaver more useful? Luckily, they have made a fair few changes - removed some not so useful features (Timelines, Web services, Layout mode, Site Map view, Java Bean support, Adobe® Flash elements Image Viewer, Adobe® Flash text and Adobe® Flash buttons, ASP.NET and JSP server behaviors and recordsets) and added some useful ones, among them:

SVN support: support for Subversion version control
Live View: Webkit based! Standards compliant! Yes and yes!
Ability to incorporate jQuery, Prototype and Spry code hinting. The kids love the code hinting
A redesigned interface: like everything else in CS4

Of all these, Live View is my favourite. Showing a more realistic preview of what the page will look like in a browser is a smart addition, and probably something that most developers would consider fundamental. There is also a feature called Live Code, which lets you freeze any JavaScript in a page, for example, so that you may examine it’s state at a particular time. You can also edit CSS and JavaScript and refresh the page to see what effect it had. Debug tools like this, combined with the Live View feature, allow a developer to do more development without actually leaving the Dreamweaver environment. These tools provide similar functionality to that provided by tools like Firebug for Firefox, but mean that you don’t have to switch applications, which is nice.

Dreamweaver CS4 is closer to what a web development tool should be than it’s predecessors - an environment rich with development tools and debugging features that allows a developer to do more with less tools. For many web developers, this will result in a better workflow, and that is good for everybody.