I recently bought a new computer and I needed to setup my web development tools. One of the pitfalls of modern web design is that there are so many open source tools installed through so many different terminal commands. I couldn’t remember which tools were gems, npm, gulp, grunt, git, sass, compass, breakpoint, minify. I’m sure other developers don’t have this problem.
While bemoaning my frustrations to anyone who would listen (mainly myself), I noticed the Dw icon sitting in my dock. “I wonder what the latest Dreamweaver does?” asked a befuddled self, obviously looking for an easy solution. After a spending a few moments reading specs for Dreamweaver 2017, I thought I’d spin it up and take it for a drive.
Several hours later, I had a basic site built using Dreamweaver to transpile my Sass files to CSS and even tried Bourbon and Bourbon Neat (pretty cool grid framework). The Developer tools in Dreamweaver were comparable to what I was using before and I felt that it was time well spent.
The moral of the story
For years I avoided Dreamweaver. In fact, I despised it. I was prejudiced against the software. Somewhere along my web development journey, I labeled the software as inadequate (probably because of the popularity of WYSIWYG tools in the late 1990s and early 2000s). But Adobe kept refining and building up the program into the competitive package of tools it is today.
In rediscovering Dreamweaver and overcoming my software prejudice, I not only have a robust development tool for the websites I build, but also a software package that I know my students can use to design and develop their websites. A win-win situation.