Most people who are going to purchase the new Adobe Photoshop CS3 are buying more power than they would ever use.
Resizing, brightening and sharpening the pictures you took with your digital camera do not require that you fork out a steep US $649. The excellent (and much cheaper) Photoshop Elements 5.0 (PSE 5.0) will do the job equally well.
In fact, I have yet to explore and exhaust all the features of my PSE 2.0!
Upgrading (or switching) to the new Dreamweaver CS3 is an altogether different matter. Here are 3 solid reasons (ignoring the marketing fluff) why you should consider doing so:
1. Improved CSS Management
CSS is short for Cascading Style Sheets and [theoretically] allows you to separate your web content from your design. This means that you are able to change design without affecting the content.
Inversely, it means the person responsible for updating the content does not have to worry about the design aspect. Well, sort of. CSS promises lots but falls short in delivering the promises.
And, it can get downright dirty and frustrating trying to design an interesting site with CSS (unless your site looks like the millions of CSS-look-alikes simpletons that the graphic designers tell you your site should look like).
But nevertheless, CSS is the way to go and, implemented thoughtfully and intelligently, can save you lots of time updating your site. While there are many editors that handle CSS (and past versions of Dreamweaver does), Dreamweaver CS3 delivers CSS management intuitively and simplifies its use in your web site.
The other advantages Adobe lists, re: CSS Advisor and Layouts, won’t really gain you much and should not be the motivation for switching or upgrading to Dreamweaver CS3. They’re just marketing gimmicks.
2. SPRY Widgets & Effects
How do you create user friendly controls on your web site? Controls such as tabs and features such as drag-n-drop? Laboriously with open sourced code that may or may not work properly — and that you would need to know how to integrate into your site.
Dreamweaver CS3 comes with SPRY that includes an AJAX framework to make all of this easy.
3. SPRY XML Data
Integrate data into your web page using XML from a database.
These 3 features make it worthwhile to consider upgrading or switching to Dreamweaver CS3. Check it out and let me know what you think.
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