Property Inspector

What is there not to love about this panel? It puts the most used commands at your fingertips, and it's dynamic, changing to properties for the selected item. At first I missed the image Reset Size button, but it's still there in the form of a small icon beside the image width and height boxes. Setting page properties, formatting text, defining image map areas, and even simple image edits like cropping, brightness and contrast, and sharpen can all be done from the Property Inspector without leaving DWMX 2004. As always if you prefer, you can send the image to Fireworks MX 2004 to be edited or optimized, and it will be automatically updated in Dreamweaver. The integration between Fireworks, Flash, and Dreamweaver is closer than ever before.

The new Page Properties button on the property inspector puts the page properties a quick click away, and they can also be accessed from the context menu as in previous versions.

As before, the tabbed interface is available for your open pages as long as they are maximized. This time the tabs are on the top of the page rather than the bottom. I'm not sure what the reason was for moving them, but it is a change that takes some getting used to.

Roundtripping

Roundtrip editing lets you work seamlessly between Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks to make sure that code updates made in one program transfer properly to the other. It will preserve links to other files and not break your rollovers or menus, resulting in more productivity for you and less time fixing things after an edit.

CSS Integration

I had a time figuring out how to attach style sheets...my favorite context menu entry "Attach Style Sheet" was missing. That was my first stumbling block, and my first trip to the online help. I still miss that context menu item, but I love the new property inspector, where styles are attached to text as easily as changing text formatting has always been by using the Style popup Menu.

If you prefer not to use this feature and leave all of your tags HTML, this is easily changed on the General page of the Preferences. Just uncheck the box for "Use CSS Instead of HTML tags". If you are designing for 3.0 version and before browsers, you may wish to do this.

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