MacDirectory magazine is the premiere creative lifestyle magazine for Apple enthusiasts featuring interviews, in-depth tech reviews, Apple news, insights, latest Apple patents, apps, market analysis, entertainment and more.
Issue link: https://digital.macdirectory.com/i/43027
FEA TURE REVIEW ADOBE CREATIVE SUITE 5.5 WEB PREMIUM >GOIN' MOBILE WORDS BY RIC GETTER In essence, Adobe's corporate mantra is now this: . This represents a sea of change since the company released 1999. Print ( in ) soon began to blend with video ( ), which flowed smoothly onto the Web. Now there is an exploding demand for content on smart phones and tablets. Adobe noted that the technology has been moving far too fast for its traditional 18-month design cycle so, starting with Creative Suite 5.5 it's been shortened to a significant "point upgrade" at one year with a full version upgrade a year after. Of all the suites, the updated applications probably represents the most significant steps to reach out to portable devices. It includes four applications that received the full "point-five" upgrade, , , , and . The "point-one" update on the other programs is simply accommodates Adobe's new subscription licensing. (Unlike cloud and software-as-a- service programs, full versions of the Creative Suite Applications are stored on your hard drive and only need authenticate online once per month). The 5.5 updates contain a number of breakthrough technologies to help developers and designers cope with life in the age of multiple online platforms. The new features may not all be polished to perfection but will open up a number of new opportunities for web-only shops and offer a productivity boost to anyone who is already attempting to cope with the plethora of platforms. Developing with Dreamweaver Originally intended to let users choose between screen and printable versions of a web page, media queries have begun to enable web sites to function on anything from a 27" iMac to an iPad or iPhone. A site can have a distinct look for each platform yet share the same basic code. provides support for media queries in some ingenious ways. The most obvious is the program's significantly enhanced Multiscreen Preview. With a very simple, single-dialog interface, it can be set to display a live preview a page for multiple destinations (conventional browser, tablet and smart-phone, for example). Each window displays your page based on the device-specific style sheet. Both the Multiscreen Preview and previously introduced Live View show greater flexibility and improved performance when working with embedded video. The jQuery library has been a boon to developers and Dreamweaver has improved its support of this timesaving code base in a couple of ways. Any loaded jQuery library is included in code hinting. However, if you're still working on getting up to speed with the popular toolbox, Dreamweaver includes a few jQuery/HTML5 Starter Pages that provide a good foundation. For developers aspiring to move into the app marketplace, Dreamweaver CS 5.5's biggest breakthrough will be the built-in PhoneGap integration. This rather remarkable framework will take a site built on HTML and JavaScript and build it into a freestanding app. With its initial release, Dreamweaver CS5.5 includes support for iOS4 and Droid. You'll need to install Xcode ($4.99 from Apple's App Store) or the Android SDK (free, with the downloader and installer built into Dreamweaver), but from that point, you can build and test mobile app versions of your site from within the program. There are also a few improvements that will help out with more traditional web development. One of our favorites is built-in support for W3C code validation that works either with the page's static code or dynamically generated HTML. The one downside to all of Dreamweaver's enhancements is that the interface is becoming rather busy. Though it has an abundance of tools for designers, the program is feeling more and more like a development environment. Like a Hollywood epic, Dreamweaver is made for the big screen. Flash Trio Adobe's trio of Flash applications, and MacDirectory 105 W r p u b l i s h e v e r y w h e r i e I n D e s i g n A I / f l P t a g t e o n c e a n d G o P u a l M r r r s kt e P a e e r E f f e c t s W P r e m i u m C S 5 . 5 e b C 5 4 a t a l . y s Dt e F ia cls eh C P er no tf re as l s i n v D ar le Fa am lsw he Ba uv le dr e F rls o a i h F ls a h P r o f e s s i o n a l , F ls a h C a t a l y s t t o r , o t h L o i sv he o e p m i , e r e , D r e a m w e a v e r C S 5 . 5