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Macromedia dreams of successEarlier this year, the technology industry magazine Red Herring published an article suggesting Web giant Macromedia was in trouble. The company had begun losing money, laid off staff, and delayed the latest release of its flagship Director multimedia authoring tool. Its traditional Apple market was weakening and the CD-ROM business was lousy. Macromedia, said the Herring writer, needed to find a direction fast. The direction turned out to be the Web. With its two-year-old Shockwave plug-in for Director, Macromedia had already made itself the third most visible technology company on the Web, after Netscape and Microsoft. But in recent months the company has first released the wonderful interactive multimedia tool Flash 2, and now unveiled the beta version of a new Web page creation tool called Dreamweaver. Gazing at Macromedia's astonishingly well-resourced stand at last month's Melbourne Interact exhibition, one Macromedia rival suggested Dreamweaver was the company's "Hail Mary" pass - in American footbal terms, the last desperate throw of a losing team. But Dreamweaver has the look not only of a solid product, but of one which shores up Macromedia's Web strategy. Guaranteed clean code plus Dynamic HTMLDreamweaver comes with not one but two unique sales pitches. It's a no-code Web authoring tool, superficially similar to Microsoft FrontPage, Claris HomePage and a host of other programs, including Macromedia's own uninspiring Backstage Designer. But Dreamweaver aims to lure the serious Web designers who've so far kept writing Web pages in the native HTML language. As this column discussed last week, such people have a well-founded fear that no-code editors will mess up their pages. Macromedia promises Dreamweaver won't alter previously written code - a promise it calls "round-trip HTML". The beta version appears to deliver. Dreamweaver goes further still: it gives Web authors the first visual tool for building in the interactive effects delivered by JavaScript and Dynamic HTML. Instead of laboriously scripting and debugging line after line of code, Dreamweaver gives you a simpler point-and-click road to page interactivity, at least for visitors using version 4.0 of Netscape's Communicator or Microsoft's Internet Explorer. The Dreamweaver beta is far from perfect. It wants a Pentium or PowerPC with at least 24Mb of RAM. Even then, there's a god chance it may crash. Netscape and Microsoft - of course - currently implement Dynamic HTML in only partly compatible fashion, and many Web designers won't feel the need to explore Dynamic HTML until the World Wide Web consortium publishes a final standard. Dreamweaver's JavaScript and Dynamic HTML code, unlike its HTML code, looks extremely messy - a function partly of the program's reliance on modules designed to fulfil various functions across different browsers. And the product won't be cheap - $A495 until the end of February, and a wallet-punching $A795 after that. Insuring against a Flash-floodNevertheless, Dreamweaver fulfils a real need for better no-code tools that can deal with increasingly complicated Web scripting. To judge from reaction in Internet discussion groups, the Web developer community is warming to it. To Macromedia chief technology officer Norm Meyrowitz, Dynamic HTML complements Flash nicely. "DHTML will be good for very basic animation, basic user-interface stuff," he says. "If you want to do something that's four minutes long, DHTML does not have … the right techniques to have the stuff perform properly." Meyrowitz may be right. But Dreamweaver also represents the second half of a two-part bet by Macromedia. The first half was Flash, which in one small but perfectly-formed package delivered to Web browsers vector graphics, quality animation, decent interactivity and seamless cross-platform audio integration. Now, Flash is a plug-in, albeit part of the Macromedia plug-in set, more widely distributed than any other. And some observers reckon Dynamic HTML, as part of the Web standard, will overshadow Flash within a year. So Dreamweaver gives Macromedia protection whichever way the game moves.
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The Red Herring
Download the Dreamweaver beta from Macromedia