Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Voices that Matter Web design conference. I had the pleasure of interviewing Lynn Grillo, Application Engineer at Adobe. I asked Lynn to summarize the goings on at Adobe with the “Sneak Peak” of the upcoming Adobe products.
Check out the four minute podcast at: WOW Technology Minute.
Stay tuned for more coverage on this topic including a one on one interview with Steve where I ask hip for a couple of tips for Web professionals that we can start using today.
Today’s podcast is sponsored by the WebProTraining.org. Check out all of the great resources and links at: WebProTraining
Transcript:
BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), the WOW Technology Minute, here at the Voices That Matter Web Design 2008 Conference here in Nashville, Tennessee. And I have the pleasure to be introducing and interviewing Lynn Grillo, the solutions engineer at Adobe, on the topic of her sneak peek session today about the upcoming releases of Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Lynn, good afternoon and thanks for agreeing to this interview.
LYNN GRILLO: Thank you.
BILL: I appreciate it. I had a couple of questions for you. Could you summarize the sneak peek today that you provided? And also, can you address the accessibility issue?
LYNN: Okay. So the summary part first. It was a lot of fun. I think a lot of people didn?’t realize that we had betas out on labs.adobe.com. And the betas are of Fireworks and Dreamweaver and Soundbooth. I didn?’t show anything in Soundbooth today, but I showed a little bit of Fireworks and a fair amount of Dreamweaver. A couple of the things that I did show relate directly to accessibility in the sense that we are going to make it a lot easier for Web developers to work with compound documents. Meaning for example, in today?’s world it?’s not just a static webpage and then another static webpage and another static webpage. It?’s a page that?’s drawing a server-side clue and an external javascript file, an external cascading style sheet. So compound documents, really difficult to manage and keep track of. There?’s a feature, my favorite feature, my favorite new feature in Dreamweaver, called Related Documents. Which now makes it really easy to not only see those documents but at the same time, while you?’re working on the code of those documents, you‘re still seeing the visual view of your page, even when you?’re switching back and forth between your css document, your doc script document and your source code.
BILL: Nice.
LYNN: They love it.
BILL: I bet.
LYNN: I think they really loved it.
BILL: I can believe it.
LYNN: So that helps with accessibility, right there. Now with Fireworks, there?’s just a ton of new features. But one of the things that I think that?’s going to benefit users a lot is the fact that now in Fireworks you can mock up your designs, do your prototypes. And two things that have bearing on this, one is, you can export directly out to a PDF. So you can send a prototype, a working prototype with javascript and everything working in it, as a PDF to your customer and make sure that it?’s all working the way they want it to work it. They can comment and review and send it back to you.
BILL: Nice.
LYNN: So then when you?’re done you can export that out as xhtml and css. Including the css being defined in an external style sheet. So it?’s allowing you to do best practices even if you?’re just solely, exclusively a designer and you?’re not a coder. So it?’s helping us help people create webpages that are going to conform to the modern standards of today.
BILL: Yeah, appreciate that. And it sounds like improving workflow not only between the designer and the developer, but between the client and the developer and designer as well.
LYNN: Well that?’s important because the client is king, right? So you want to make sure that you can give your client, your customer and even internal customers, for a lot of companies where they?’re doing work internally for their own company–
BILL: Sure.
LYNN: To make sure what they?’re working on, what they?’re delivering is going to be, is going to get a check off and say yes.
BILL: Yeah.
LYNN: That?’s what we want.
BILL: And for our accountable purposes you?’re actually recording that in a document form so, for later reference, right?
LYNN: That?’s right. Actually the PDF that comes out of Fireworks, you can put security on it. You can regulate it to the point of saying, “This person can open it up and comment on it but they can?’t copy out of it. They can?’t–” You can say no they can?’t print, or they can print. So you can do all sorts of things like that.
But back on the Dreamweaver side of the fence, we also have a really cool new feature in there called Live Code. So when you?’re working with code on server, what you?’re writing it to, what you?’re coding into your webpage is one thing and what comes out of the browser is something else. So if you look at the page in a browser, after it?’s been processed by the server, and you do “view source,” what you see there is not the same as what you?’re seeing in the page code prior to going to the server. So that one of the new features in Dreamweaver let?’s you see that, that actual change that?’s happening in the code so you can see exactly what?’s happening. You can even freeze javascript at a certain point so you can do diagnostics on it and introspection on it. And there?’s also code navigator, another neat tool that allows you to very quickly find the exact cascading style sheet you?’re looking for.
And the other big one is code-hinting for AJAX and custom javascript. So it?’s going to allow people to do their own custom hand-coding in Dreamweaver a lot quicker and be very precise about it, make sure that they?’ve got exactly, no, there aren?’t going to be any spelling mistakes or typos or anything like that. And it?’s a pretty cool tool. I saw some eyelids go–
BILL: Yeah, sounds like it!
LYNN: What!
BILL: What a great sneak peek. I appreciate that. Excellent stuff.
LYNN: Pleasure.
BILL: Yeah, thank you so much Lynn. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW). Thank you so much Lynn.
Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by webprotraining.org. Webprotraining.org offers a complete solution for all of your Web professional training needs including WOW certification options. Check it out and webprotraining.org.