Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 review

The key selling point of Dreamweaver hasn’t changed since its early days as a Macromedia product. This is a powerful but expensive web-design tool that allows you to create pages visually in Design view, by typing the HTML yourself in Code view, or via any combination of the two.

The Design view has extensive palettes and windows to tweak almost every aspect of each photo element, while Code view has automatic code completion to speed up the process for back-to-basics web programmers. Live view, a feature available since CS4, gives a more browser-like look at the page without having to save and preview it in a separate browser.

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Unlike CS5.5, which helped coders immensely with auto-completion support for the popular jQuery Javascript library, this latest version offers more new tools for fans of Design view page creation. There is a clear theme to many of the new features; this is a Dreamweaver designed more than ever for creating content that will be viewed on the go.

The biggest and best of these new features is Phone Gap. This tool turns HTML and Javascript into mobile apps for most common smartphones and is accessed via the Phone Gap Build Service option in the Site menu. This is remarkably simple; rather than installing loads of additional software on the computer, you can create a mobile app, upload it to the appropriate app stores and more, in just a few clicks.

Dreamweaver can also help you create suitable HTML mobile pages in the first place, too. Support for jQuery Mobile was added in CS5.5, and you can now add jQuery Mobile pages and elements from a menu – a handy timesaver for coders, as well as designers.

Not everyone wants to create separate websites or apps for mobile devices, however, so CS6 introduces new tools for those who want to visually create pages that will scale nicely across different devices. The Fluid Grid Layout system sets up pages for you using common HTML5 tools so it is possible, in Design view, to create a layout that scales nicely across the differently sized screens available on different devices.

The process of creating suitable pages is still fiddly but it allows designers to create adaptive layouts that would previously require hand-coding. Dreamweaver has multiple view modes for Mobile, Tablet and Desktop, so it is straightforward to judge how a page will look at different screen resolutions.

Away from mobile, a few other changes will make life easier for users of the Design view. It is now possible to apply multiple CSS effects to a page element; simply select them from a list. A new window makes it easy to add CSS3 transitions, such as fading an element in or out when the mouse touches it, with no Javascript required.

Dreamweaver CS6 does not add a huge number of new tools but the ones that are added are both thoughtfully chosen and well implemented. If you have CS5 then it is well worth upgrading. For CS5.5 users, the choice will largely depend on your use of Design view and how much you create for mobile devices. For new users, the £357 price alone makes the decision simple; this is a brilliant tool if making websites is your priority but otherwise it’s just too expensive.