Some 9 years ago, I bought Macromedia Dreamweaver 3 Fireworks 3 Studio for about $150 to 155 with an academic discount. I was still a graduate student at that time. I only wanted Dreamweaver and didn’t use Fireworks very much.

Nowadays, our work without Fireworks is unthinkable. Fireworks is not necessarily a great application to use. It’s just that you can edit graphic files fast. It’s not like there are many things that you can do with Fireworks, which you can’t with Photoshop.

How about Dreamweaver? I won’t say life without Dreamweaver is unimaginable. It’s true that Dreamweaver is one of the most widely used HTML editor for both Mac and Windows. Dreamweaver is a mature product just like Microsoft Word and Excel. Some Mac users had a good reason to upgrade their Microsoft Office, though. Microsoft never released a Universal upgrade for Office 2004 products so that they could sell more units of Office 2008, which runs natively on Intel Mac computers. Again, how about Dreamweaver?

Adobe officially started shipping CS4 products including Dreamweaver CS4 and Fireworks CS4 in mid-October. The release cycle is quite short. It’s only 18 months. Adobe started shipping CS3 products in April, 2007. Dreamweaver 9 and other CS3 products were already compatible with Intel Mac computers natively. So some Mac users may not feel they need to upgrade their Adobe CS3 products. And our recommendation is… Don’t waste your money.  Continue reading →