I tend to use Dreamweaver 7.01 (MX, 2000 something-or-other.. they keep changing the version numbers and product name) various online projects around the 'net. It uses a handy interface that makes handling lots of files much easier. It makes life easy for me to search through multiple files at once, and to do global updates on a series of files if one image or page is moved.

Of late Macromedia chose to update their product to version 8. Now I was waiting for this release myself as there's several bugs that bugged me (sorry bad pun), and as Macromedia have a nasty habit of releasing new versions rather than updating their software set with fixes I was left to wait for the new version to see if things were fixed.

Well version 8 was launched just before I went on me hols and I took a moment to give it a whirl (you can grab demo's off them for free).

The things that bothered me in version 7.01 were:

• when uploading a file the entire system locks up and you can't do anything else in DW until it's finished sending that file online.
• if you selected some text and then went to make a link, keyboard cursor movement sortcuts (like CRTL+left) moved the cursor in the design window, rather than the cursor in the URL box you were editing (that really annoys me).
• if the page is stretched by inserting a large image and that image is removed the page still stay the size it was stretched to and refuses to shrink. You have to toggle a refresh or hit F4 twice to get around this. (& still not fixed in 8)
• inserting and removing images in table layout annoyingly results in the view window jumping to the bottom of the table for some operations (particuarly if the table has been forced to resize). (& still not fixed in 8)

Now comes version 8, with a new and improved upload feature and numberous fixes (note most of them were bug fixes.. not feature enhancements).

All goes well until I drag and drop a set of images from Windows Explorer onto a page I'm designing. I do this a million times in 7, you create an image, or find the one you need then drop it in the window.

If you drag a single image onto the window with 8 it seems to drop it into the HTML code somewhere it feels like (normally at the top). Okay so you think.. I can live with that. Then I noticed what happens if you drop a number of files in at once (again this always used to work). What happens is that the first image is dumped in randomly, then the next image of the collection is rendered over the top, replacing it, and so on and so forth until you have the last image inset. You are then left with the last image of the selection dropped in shown, and all the rest overwritten. If you do a CTRL-Z to undo things you can even step backwards through the history to see how the god-awful program code has done things. You might think that dragging multiple images from DW's own file explorer onto a design page would work, but no - you can only rag one file at a time.

When the bug was put on the DW support lists, the suggestion was simply "not to do it". Great.

Overall DW 8 performs more like DW7.2 beta. There's new features sure, but they are not in my opinion worty of a new version number. Lots of the features are just fixes that many of us have been waiting for for the past year, and the now broken image inset method renders it pretty useless for me to do design work in.

I do like Dreamweaver, but that's a bit like me saying I'd prefer to be shot in the leg than stabbed in the chest. I don't get on with Microsoft's Frontpage, and the offering from Adobe has yet to make the grade in my books. As for th rest of the world there's not much else out there at the moment that I've seen that really comes close to what I need/like. I'm not upgrading yet, as there's no sign from Macromedia that they plan on competantly fixing the reported issues in the new version (more than just the bug I found), so why purchase a half-bodged version?