Why I Madly Love Dreamweaver Today
The Rocket Scientist is opposed to buying software that has licenses activated, on general principle and because we usually have at least six computers between the two of us – a desktop Mac each which are our two main computers, a laptop each for travel, a Windows machine or two for testing. Then there is the laptop and desktop (for visitors during sleepovers) in The Spoiled One’s room.
Any software that lets you license a personal copy on a set number of computers is grounds for a tirade. He suggested a number of alternatives to Dreamweaver for my latest project and I looked at a couple of them. In the end, I ignored his advice which I don’t usually do in these situations. It may be bloated and inelegant (people always say that about applications that have been around a while and keep adding features) compared to whatever the newest shiny thing is. I don’t know. It certainly is expensive. What I do know is this:
1. I know how to use Dreamweaver. Although I haven’t been using it much the last couple of years, mostly doing sites in WordPress, I spent a lot of years using Dreamweaver, ever since I migrated from GoLive when Adobe bought it. WordPress won’t work for what I need and the hours to get equally familiar with anything new far exceed the cost of a license.
2. There are a lot of tutorials, forum posts, videos, books and blogs on Dreamweaver. Information is easy to find for what I need to do.
3. There are a lot of extensions that are plug and play. Yes, those cost money, too, but as I have discussed on this blog before, time has value. If I can buy something for $49 that would take me three hours to write, that is a good deal. If there is something out there free that does the same thing but it would take me thirty minutes to find it and another thirty to figure it out because the documentation is non-existent, $49 is still a good deal.
4. That whole bloated ware inelegant thing frequently saves my ass. Let me give you a minor example today. One of the words on our site is in Dakota. A person who is a native speaker of Dakota (yes, one of the few in the world and I am so happy to be working with her) sent me an email and said that we had spelled one of the Dakota words wrong. Unfortunately, we had been working on this for a while before she came on board and I was not too excited about going through every page and changing the spelling. I wasn’t even sure of what pages contained this word. I wanted a grep command for the site. Well, one of the things that Dreamweaver does is let you do a find and replace on your entire local site. As a general rule, this can be a recipe for disaster but in this case, it found 55 pages where this word was used – misspelled – and changed all of the occurrences to the correct spelling.
So this is why I love Dreamweaver today.