Hacker News Reader

Comment by breakfastduck | Hacker News Reader

Must admit my comment is spurred by the first few words but my god Dreamweaver was so good in the early 2000's.

I actually got introduced to it in ICT lessons at high school.

Oh Adobe. The memory of their software is so nostalgic. Don't get me started, I'll be talking about macromedia shockwave next...

View on HN

Dreamweaver templates were the original static site generator. I used them to build a bunch of small sites in the early 2000’s. They worked so well that the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum used them to run its site until 2018:

https://mw19.mwconf.org/glami/smithsonian-national-museum-of...

As recently as a couple years ago I had colleagues still using Dreamweaver to code up email templates (email is the Land Before Time of HTML rendering where tables still rule for layout).

Dreamweaver started at Macromedia too, as did Flash and Cold Fusion. It’s amazing the impact Macromedia had. The founders later went on to start Brightcove, one of the first big white label cloud video providers.

I got my start on Drumbeat which later was purchased by macromedia. I miss my spinning 3D text gifs.

Drumbeat was incredible. VB for the web.

No web UI component framework has matched the usability of VB.

Why haven't we seen a true successor?

Microsoft should do a native TypeScriptVB or something.

I love how xcode's object -> function mapping seems inspired by visual basic / delphi, but actually makes no fucking sense when compared to those tools.

Indeed, I still have one backend in production built back then with Drumbeat. Its UI was very new and rebuilt/consulted with Alan Cooper of Thunder/Visual Basic/About Face fame.

Interesting. I remember Alan Cooper. He wore a beret type hat.

RIP macromedia. That suite was the best $400 AUD I ever spent as a teenager running my own web agency in the mid to late 2000s!

My start was Microsoft FrontPage 2000, which I used for years even after I stopped using the GUI features for development.

I skipped Dreamweaver entirely and went to straight text editors.

Nowadays on the frontend you can more or less recreate the same effect with Webpack hot reloading. You get instant feedback on changes which makes for a supremely productive development experience.

It's how I got my professional start too. It's code editor and file management was pretty nice for the time.

Basically the winning feature was that the UX was essentially the same as Photoshop.

Slice up those PSDs and, WOW I can try coding it up myself and it kinda-sort looks-works the same as PS!

It was the exact tool Photoshop using website designers needed to up-skill smoothly.

Mine as well...in 2015, at a university that maintained lot of small-to-medium complexity websites. It did the job well and was easy to work with, even if I sometimes felt like was carving in my 1s and 0s with stone and chisel.

But if I were still working there I would probably replace most of the sites - which were largely abstractions of forms and tables - with something like power apps instead.

Still can't comprehend why we haven't had 'winforms' again but modern and not windows based.

Power Apps is good but not great.

Same reason people will spend thousands of hours working on libraries like pandas but won't make a better excel. Or something like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com