DW, vs Coda, vs Pinegrow etc?

General
1

My old DW CS3 is broken, but I’m used to the DW interface for 10 years.

I don’t want to pay the extorionist/ Price gauging Adobe ($240 year after year), so I peeked to today at Pinegrow and Coda. Coda looked a lot more like DW. It’s preview was normal whereas Pinegrow’s preview was wacky looking.

But I did not see an equivalent Design view, in Coda. Is Coda the most DW looking of the alternatives or is there a closer software to DW?

I do pay Adobe $10 every month for PS – the photographer bundle. Is there a better deal I can get on DW, as I currently subscribe to that? Or with student rate? Or some idea how to get DW CC better priced than the overpriced standard price?

2

Once you stop paying Adobe all the software stops working and you have to uninstall.
If you pay the stand alone price for Pinegrow you get to use it forever and you get 1 year of updates which can be renewed for additional years for far less than Adobe’s yearly fees. Depends on the subscription.

If you check out the company Serif and their Affinity line of software you can get Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer which has many Photoshop type of features without the bloat. Though it really depends on what it is you are using Photoshop for. You can get their software for less than Creative Cloud and they do not expire.

Dreamweaver has been consistently reduced in features that it become unusable for me in any real way years ago. I can not help you with finding a clone of what you are used to, there really isn’t that I am aware of exact feature to feature match.

Pinegrow is the closest real world current standards compliant web design tool available that is not tied to a specific framework. This allows the freedom of choice with how you choose to create your site designs.

Anything Adobe CS5 and below is no longer standards compliant and should not be used. Once Creative Cloud Subscription took over Adobe’s business model they eliminated the ability to activate stand alone applications you purchased on physical media. So ALL stand alone software once it became unactivated or you had to reinstall there was no way to make it work, legally anyway.

3

Make sure that you convert all your Dreamweaver Templates to HTML because there is no conversion and once you stop your subscription Dreamweaver will stop working and you will lose all access to their proprietary file formats. Their version of DWT does not conform to standards compliant DWT files and are Adobe specific so export ALL your source files to raw html or you will have no access to them.

4

Adobe CS6 products (at least PS and AI) work without subscription. I don’t use Dreamweaver, but I’d assume the C6 version would also work. Not sure if you can purchase a CS6 Dreamweaver (why would anyone want to?) but it can be "obtained’ without a huge effort.

I’m on PC, so I can’t comment on Coda, but Pinegrow is light years beyond Adobe DW. Unless I’m mistaken, Coda is not a visual builder, so it’s rather different than PG and DW. Pinegrow lets you build however you feel most comfortable. You can use its visual tools, work in its code-view windows, or link up an external code editor (which is how I work) like Atom or VisualStudio.

I’ve heard some Mac users I know speak highly of Blocs, which is a Boostrap visual builder for the Mac, but if you’re going with Bootstrap, (and don’t want to go with Pinegrow, which would be my first choice), Bootstrap Studio is a pretty powerful visual builder that gives you a fair amount of control over the code, though nothing like Pinegrow. It’s been so long since I even opened Dreamweaver I can barely remember what it was like to work with it (other than that it was headache-inducing.)

I think Pinegrow is pretty much the best all-around website builder on the market today. There are only a couple of other programs out there that compare in features, flexibility, and can output clean semantic code, and none of them are as inexpensive. Webflow costs more, locks you into their cloud model, and you can’t import sites. Wappler costs considerably more and isn’t as polished or powerful. If you’re only interested in Bootstrap, Bootstrap Studio is a powerful and inexpensive program that produces clean, semantic code, but it can’t import sites.

Basically, nothing out there can touch Pinegrow, although Pinegrow isn’t perfect. There’s no built-in FTP, it doesn’t come with templates, and if you want to do e-commerce, blogging, or anything involving a database, you’ll need to go with Pinegrow’s Wordpress version.

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5

Adobe has as far as I am aware removed the ability to activate non-subscription based versions of their software and stopped selling them.

There are illegal hacks out there that allow you to use old versions without activating them BUT the software is so far out of date especially with current standards compliance it would be counter productive to use them.

As far as support goes… their official support via india, does not even know about the current software they rent out let alone any old versions.

As of now there is no one size fits all solution out there and from past options that attempted this, you would not really want them.

Adobe has pretty much shelved any software they developed or acquired that does anything similar to what Pinegrow does and steadily removed features from Dreamweaver. They say they focus on their corporate clients but as far as I know that is mostly in the Design, Entertainment and Animation field, not web development. Basically Photoshop, Animation, Video Production and Effects etc…

The freelance web designer and developers have been pretty steadily pushed away for years by Adobe. Opening room for Pinegrow and other small companies and the open source community to fill the gap.

Brackets was developed by Adobe and then supposedly co-developed with the open-source community but then Adobe stopped all development as far as I remember not too soon after. Since Brackets was so close to Atom in features and functionality I eventually just switched all the way over to Atom and have not looked at Brackets since.

When choosing the tool(s) to do what you want to do, you need to first know what it is that you will be doing and the technologies you will be using. Choose the tools that fit your use case and start creating.

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6

Older, (non Creative Cloud) versions of Adobe programs like Photoshop CSx and Illustrator CSx are still perfectly relevant and usable programs. They still produce useable files in non-Adobe specific formats (eg. eps, jpg, tif, png, etc.) I was unaware that you could no longer register them. That seems… criminal. If you paid for a program and have a license key, you should be able to register it for as long as you want. Fortunately, the private (read hacker) community develops workarounds to this sort of corporate bullying.

Program specific files like .ai and .psd are usable as well, but the older programs are limited (in some instances) when it comes to being able to open the newer versions of these file formats created in the CC applications. Abode did (and does) do this deliberately to force users to upgrade. I worked in pre-press for years and it was hugely frustrating to get, say, a file create in Adobe InDesign CS3 and not be able to open it in InDesign CS2 because CS2 lacked some of the new features CS3 possessed. We were always jumping to upgrade our software, and it was costly.

When you have a monopoly in the design industry, like Adobe has, you can really screw people over. Especially considering that a lot of the stuff Adobe comes out with is utter crap (ie. Muse)

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7

You would not want to create web pages with Dreamweaver CS3. The design software Photoshop, illustrator etc… would still be usable and for an artist would work fine. Though there are many 3rd party applications available now that it would be worth uninstalling the older Adobe versions for.

Adobe made a statement saying they were shutting down the registration site, server api that handled the registration process for all CS6 and below versions. They consider those versions dead.

If you have them activated do not uninstall or deactivate them because you will not be able to reactivate them. If you are into the piracy side of software then you would not need the creative cloud, all their software up to a certain version is available for free out there. With the bonus of malware and trojans embedded in them.

8

I’d rather get a root canal without novicane then use ANY Adobe product to build a website.

I supported Adobe for years, spending many thousands of dollars, starting with Photoshop 3 all the way up to Illustrator 11. When the CS programs started coming out fast and furious, and the registration process necessitated “phoning home” to Adobe, I felt Adobe was starting to abuse the very people who stuck by it for decades before it became a big shot industry leader with $200 a share stock.

The warez community mercilessly pirating Adobe programs was something Adobe largely brought on themselves. Record labels figured out relatively quickly that the way to get people to buy music instead of pirating it was to make an easy to use system where songs were fairly priced and could be simply downloaded.

Adobe refused to stop being greedy. They just kept making their suite bigger, more expensive, and more resource hungry, with a nightmarish installation process, constant phoning home to Adobe’s servers, and lack of backwards compatibility. Every 12-18 months, they’d release a new version with a few new (largely useless) features that forced design agencies and service bureaus to shell out money, and go through the whole tedious upgrade process just so they could accept newer files that couldn’t be opened with older software versions.

They thought their cloud-based subscription service would satisfy all the people who were angry about having to constantly spend time and money updating their programs, but it was really just the ultimate slap in the face. Basically, Adobe told it’s loyal customers who stood by them for three decades, “now you don’t get to buy our software, you get to rent it, and if you stop paying rent, you get nothing!”

(That last part should be read in the voice of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka.)

I hope Adobe has lost billions due to piracy.

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9

this should serve as a case study in why capitalism fails.

10

Except that historically, capitalism is the most successful economic system the world has ever seen.

Adobe is an example of the evils of corporatism. not capitalism. Over the past 15 years, Adobe has grown from 2 billion in annual revenue to 9 billion. You can make a lot of money giving people an inferior product if you buy up all your competition first.

11

depends on your definition of “successful”, i suppose… i find it increacingly difficult to distinqush between corporatism and capitalism.

12

Capitalism is you cut hair and I make tables. I sell you a table and you cut my hair. We each do a good job, make sure our client is happy, and make a fair profit for our labor/service.

Corporatism is when you open a chain of barber shops and I open a chain of table factories, and instead of caring about the quality of the haircuts and tables, or how satisfied the customers are, or charging a fair price, we only worry about selling as many haircuts and tables as possible so the people who invested in our respective chains get their dividends, and keep giving us more money to fund our operations.

13

one invariably leads to the other because what constitutes a “fair price” is not done out in the open, but rather becomes propriatary information.

profit is not something that should be allowed to go unchallenged or unexamined (or untaxed).

14

If you need a table, and don’t know how to make a table yourself, and I’m the only person in the country who knows how to make tables and I keep this knowledge proprietary, then yes, the term “fair price” can be nebulous.

But we don’t live in a vacuum. There are lots of people making tables, and lots of people who don’t make tables but still understand the value of the labor and materials that goes into them. Knowledge is power. That’s why it’s important to be an educated consumer in a capitalist economy.

If a person is selling something that is extremely rare, and there are no competing vendors, then yes, a fair price is whatever the market will bear. But in capitalist economies, such situations rarely last long.

Like the saying goes, capitalism is the worst economic system ever devised… except for all the others.

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15

you just laid out a case study of how a company edged out all the competition and then took advantage of that situation to charge whatever they wanted.

this is a subject of considerable interest to me, which is why your story struck home with me.

i have no beef with anyone who want’s to make their living supplying others with vital goods/services, my issue is with deceit in the process.

knowing (admitting) that capitalism is designed around taking advantage of ignorance in order to amass wealth, puts a kind of spin on it that rubs up against this notion of “fair price”.

at any rate, we’ve strayed FAR from the subject of this forum post… so, i’ll leave it there.

16

Wow!
This is FAB! I have totally enjoyed this, it puts some of my blethering to shame…er, now,
what was the question again?
Keep up the good work gang!

One day all forums will be built this way… HonK!

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17

i can be “extrememly online” when a subject strikes me.

my appoligies.

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18

They have removed the older versions that required a methodology of verification that Adobe no longer support but if you own versions of the software that used the now obsolete verification method they provide a free download of the software you currently own that replaces it with a version that uses a different verification method.

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19

Rob -Please be specific - I have a CS6 suite that says it has had its lic revoked when I go to reinstall. I can not find a way to re-install software that I purchased!

I am moving away from all Adobe, hence Pinegrow and Affinity, but I am quite concerned that if I need to reinstall and I can’t - then many years of work are rated…

20

This is not correct at least in the last 2 years. Adobe has put an end to ALL non-subscription activations and if you contact them about it they will not respond to you.

All the pages have been pulled off of Adobe’s website.

You can get pirated versions with malware, viruses and trojans that let hackers into your computer, that has the activation mechanism removed. Though the older software even though you can use it for web design will never have the current standards or up to date versions of javascript, php etc…

Photoshop will be ok and some of the other applications are usable but the current codecs are not installed and I am not sure if they can be updated. Premiere, Audition CS6 versions etc…

For most people that have the stand alone software from Adobe or Macromedia, if it has or ever becomes deactivated they are out of luck the license will be revoked.

Unless anyone has specific information they can link to from Adobe within the 2019+ year that states otherwise. Stand-alone versions of their software are not capable of being activated without subscription, even the software sold at Staples, Office supply stores require a license subscription.