It’s that time of year again where I get to hang out with designers, developers, and partners at the annual Adobe MAX conference. As many of you know, it’s in Los Angeles, CA this year and I’m excited as I’m taking the train up there – I’ve never been on Amtrak before but I hear it’s very nice and it beats fighting through LA rush hour traffic. I’ll be at the show from Monday through Wednesday and will be posting regularly to our Twitter and Facebook accounts so be sure to follow us for updates and maybe we can meet up for a cold beverage if you’re attending the show.
Archive for September 2009
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As you probably already know, the next major release of Windows is scheduled to be released to the public on October 22. Being that we are a software company that has support the matrix of Windows and Mac operating systems out there, we have done some light testing on the release candidates and betas of Windows 7 over the past year. However, we’ve been bitten before so we really hold off on thoroughly testing all of our Dreamweaver extensions until RTM or GMC builds are available.
Now that the final build of Windows 7 is available to us MSDN subscribers, we are now comfortable moving forward with compatibility testing. We’re just at the beginning of this process but I thought I’d let you know what our first impressions are and to let you know that it’s on our radar. Overall, I think Windows users are going to be happy with this release and these are the important takeaways:
- Dreamweaver CS3 and CS4 seem to run fine
- CSS Sculptor v3 seems to run just fine and we don’t expect major issues with our other extensions
- Most things seem to run much faster than they did in Vista
We will definitely keep you in the loop as our team continues its testing and verification on Windows 7. Definitely post to our support forum if any of you early adopters run into any issues.
CSS Sculptor 3
We have just released the next generation of the CSS Sculptor Dreamweaver extension. New features in this version include the ability to add Spry components and the ability to manage and alter the color schemes of your page layouts right from within the tool. The new version also comes with more professionally designed preset layouts to help you get started quickly. All active subscribers to the Extension Library subscription already have CSS Sculptor 3 in their download center and can start using it immediately. Click here for more information on CSS Sculptor 3.
In the past, a common feature request for our website has been for us to implement some kind of search functionality. We have actually tried to implement a good search system a few times in the past and for one reason or another, it just didn’t work out. A few years back, our site was written in ASP and we used Microsoft’s built in index server. That was OK but it was a bear to configure and maintain. When we switched to PHP, we looked at a bunch of PHP based solutions out there but they had similar issues. We realized that the only real way to get good, meaningful search results on our site was to use the market leading technology out there – that meant either Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft search solutions.
Yahoo! BOSS
After much deliberation and testing, we picked Yahoo! BOSS to power our search. Why you ask? Well three reasons: 1) you can’t beat the price (currently free); 2) it is very easy to customize; 3)it is extremely flexible. Why re-invent the wheel when a powerhouse like Yahoo! has spent hundreds of millions on developing the technology for you. That being said, I hope Microsoft’s recent deal with Yahoo! doesn’t kill this product as it is way cool. Check out our search at http://www.webassist.com/search and let us know what you think.
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