Software Review: Adobe Master Collection – Dreamweaver CS6, Fireworks CS6, and Flash Professional CS6 From Adobe Systems

This is the seventh of a series of reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe CS6 Master Collection. Adobe releases CS6 with four separate suites of products. They are Design Standard, Design & Web Premium, Production Premium, Master Collection. Add to that, they also have the Creative Cloud – a subscription based suite that gives you access to all of the individual products for a $49.99 per month subscription fee. You can go online to compare what is contained in each version. The goal of this series is to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS6

Adobe Dreamweaver CS6, a hybrid based web development software application that was originally developed and distributed by Macromedia. It was acquired by Adobe in 2005, and it is available for both the Mac and Windows operating systems.

As a hybrid, Adobe Dreamweaver CS6 is both a WYSIWYG editor that allows you to see the results of what you are developing before having to publish to your website as well as a code-based editor that lets you hand code your sites as well. The goal of Dreamweaver is to provide an intuitive visual interface for making and editing standards based websites and applications for desktops, smartphones, and tablets.

So what is new with Dreamweaver CS6?

• Fluid grid layout – starter templates are introduced in CS6 to help you create adaptable layouts for pages using a versatile multi-column design grid. This way you can visually construct fluid grid layouts in Design view and then use CSS3 authoring tools to enhance your design. By generating adaptive, scaling layouts, you avoid the issues that can occur when attempting to display fixed-width layouts across a wide variety of screens. This way, when you preview designs, the pages resize, as do the page regions (including inserted images) and scale to fit the available screen area.

• Multiscreen previews – enable you to view three different screen sizes and run your HTML5 and CSS3 code in real time. This updated functionality allows you to quickly and easily preview your designs for smartphones, tablets, and computer screens—all at the same time. You can also preview custom screen sizes and test the behavior of HTML5 and CSS3 code for each device. The new support for HTML5 and the updated Multiscreen Preview panel can help you create websites and web applications using the latest technologies as well as giving you the ability to build mobile apps and configure them to display separate CSS3 style sheets for each device.

Article Author: T. Michael Testi

T. Michael Testi is a writer and a photographer out of Edmond Oklahoma. You can see his photographic and art work at T Michael Imaging.

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