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Introducing the Dreamweaver CS4 interface
Dreamweaver CS4 has a radically new interface. Although it preserves a lot of familiar features, it's not just a cosmetic change. There's a much bigger choice of predefined workspace layouts, and there's virtually no limit on the way you can reorganize the workspace to suit your own personal needs.
Several other new features—Related Documents, Live View, and Code Navigator—are likely to make a significant change to the way you work with web pages in Dreamweaver.
- Related Documents presents a list of documents linked to the current page, giving you access to them in Split View while the web page remains displayed.
- Live View brings the WebKit browser engine directly into the Document window, letting you see the effect of rollovers and other dynamic effects without leaving Dreamweaver. Edit a related document, such as a style sheet, in Split View, and Live View shows the changes immediately. No more popping back and forth to see the changes in an external browser.
- The Code Navigator makes working with CSS much easier. Alt/Opt-click on the section of a page you want to restyle, and the Code Navigator presents you with a list of all relevant styles for inspection. Find the one you want to change, click it, and you're taken directly to the code in the stylesheet.
However, describing these changes in words doesn't really do justice to them. Seeing is believing. So I have created two short video tutorials demonstrating the changes and how they work. The videos are large, so they open in a separate window, which should be expanded to full screen. (Note: these videos are based on the public beta that was released in May 2008. The final version, released in October of the same year, is almost identical.)
