Skip to main content

Will we ever get Dreamweaver on Linux?

I have been a keen user of Ubuntu for some time now, and have to admit that this distribution has improved by leaps and bounds. However, what I do honestly miss on windows is... Dreamweaver. Some will swear by it, some will swear at the mention of its name. But for me, it is a very powerful tool when used correctly.

Such a very popular and powerful web design and development tool is available on Windows and Mac OS, but not Linux. If you would just consider, Adobe has already supported the platform with their Adobe Reader and Adobe Air. Why is Dreamweaver not available? It just seems that there's not such a huge call for it so they just don't see the need to put in an effort for another platform.

One chap at Adobe suggested to use Dreameaver under wine, but it doesn't work so great. There is an alternative to wine which, according to a user on the forums, works flawlessly - Crossover. However, the former option is not free, so some may be dissuaded where they would be paying for a Dreamweaver license and for Crossover. Still, there's nothing better than having the actual for-the-platform program.

As I browse the forums searching for an answer, all I'm presented with are Linux alternatives. Some are editors and some are WYSIWYG tools:
  • NVU/Kompozer - which is good but feels like Frontpage
  • Quanta Plus - which is intended for KDE and is pretty decent, but not as user friendly as Kompozer. It works in GNOME, but managed to shut down with me a couple of times
  • BlueFish - a pretty cool editor, which supports an arsenal of scripting languages
  • Screem
  • GEdit
  • GNU Emacs
  • and any other editor you can think of.
  • Eclipse - not a WYSIWYG tool but much more than an editor. This is a fully fledged IDE to program in pretty much any language.
At the moment, I'm stuck with a bunch of apps:
  • Kompozer for quickly creating mashups for clients
  • BlueFish for all my coding (and cleaning up the code from Kompozer)
  • FileZilla to publish the site. Kompozer does have a site manager tool, but I avoid using it as Kompozer is not used often. Plus FileZilla is excellent for FTP.
Even with this collection, I'm still stuck in getting anywhere near the functionality of Dreamweaver. Also, I'd like to avoid overloading my computer with a bunch of apps just for web design and development.

So please Adobe. Pretty, pretty please, with cherry on top. Bring Dreamweaver onto Linux. It is definitely worth paying for.

UPDATE:
Looks like I'm not the only person who feels this way. Someone on the forums has provided a link and some advice for contacting Adobe: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-946645.html

UPDATE #2:
I can't believe that I totally forgot about Aptana. I used this very able system on Windows a long time ago, but my workplace at that time decided to follow a policy of permissible software to use for all things programming.

This tool includes
  • code assistance for html, css and javascript
  • javascript debugging
  • site manager including ftp (and other remote working methods) for file transfer and syncing
  • switch between your code and rendered previews
It's interface is not so alien for Eclipse users, but pales in comparison in functionality since it serves a specific purpose. This is much closer to my desired experience and am very glad to pick up on this tool again.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Get the most out of your browser

A whole year without a blog post! Now that I've changed job, I'm hoping that I can settle down and push more useful tips on my blog. So, to get back to form I have one about web browser productivity. Web browsers have come a long way since it's inception in the early days of the World Wide Web. But if you've just been using it to browse the Web, you are really missing out on a ton of stuff. Productivity is just the start of it. Let's take a look at some of the hidden gems that a browser has to offer. I will mostly be focusing on Chrome and Firefox, but a lot (if not all) the tips may apply to your favourite browser. Pin Tabs First up is the ability to pin a tab. You do this by right-clicking on a tab and selecting Pin Tab . Did you just see how it react? It resize and just shows the icon. If you have a lot of tabs this is a real space saver. Using Keywords Firefox has keyword bookmarking, which is an absolute essential for many. This allows you to call a
Post a Comment
Read more

Image links in IE8

While mocking up a design page for a colleague's website I came across a new browser behaviour in IE8. This was the first time I used IE8 as my main development browser, due to the fact that the PC was re-installed and high-priority updates were applied. Surprisingly Microsoft branded IE8 as a priority update. Anyway, back to what I was talking about, here's a sample: <a href="index.htm"><img src="logo2.jpg" alt="Logo" title="Logo" /></a> As you can tell, this is using an image for a link, where it behaves well in Chrome, Firefox and in the previous versions of IE (7 and older). But in IE8, this is not the case as the DOM does not treat the image as innerText, only as a child node. As a result, everytime I hover the mouse over this image, an extra gap would come from nowhere shifting any relatively positioned elements. To fix this I explicitly added a space (&nbsp;), so the line would look like: <a href="inde
3 comments
Read more