Adobe Dreamweaver is widely used in website production.
It's been several years since I started doing production work. At first I built sites in Design mode, which is visually easy to understand, but now I do more than 95% of my work in Text mode. The reason is that Design mode didn't reproduce things 100% as I had built them — the reproduction rate just wasn't quite there. Commonly used elements, or code that has been around for a long time — anything supported by all browsers — displayed correctly.
However, when I tried to use less common features, services, or presentation styles, those parts wouldn't display in the visually verifiable Design mode. For sites with a lot of originality, I ended up feeling that editing in text code and writing it directly was less confusing...
Even when Dreamweaver was upgraded, editing in Text mode meant I didn't feel much benefit from it, and I never thought, "Let's try out the new features!" I just kept working away in silence.
But then Adobe CC came along, and Dreamweaver — which previously required buying expensive software — became available on a monthly subscription, so it also became possible to "give it a casual try and give up if it doesn't work out." As a result, I've been getting occasional requests to teach people how to use it.
With Illustrator and Photoshop, I always kept up with the latest versions after Adobe CC came out and used them in my school classes, but with Dreamweaver, since I was just typing in code as text, I didn't feel any particular need to upgrade. I wasn't even using Dreamweaver much — I'd edit in a text editor instead.
...But when it comes to teaching, I really ought to be on the latest version, so I upgraded from 2015 to 2017.
And the result......
Text mode has been improved enormously!!!!!
I'm thrilled!
Dreamweaver has a feature that suggests candidates when you type the first letters of a word while entering code.
Say you need to write the word "blockquote." Type "b" and it will offer "blockquote" as a suggestion. But as I wrote at the start, it didn't offer suggestions for every piece of code, so for words that didn't come up, I had to either memorize them or look them up. Honestly, since I'm terrible at English, there were times when I gave up on using a certain piece of code because I couldn't remember it. And in the latest version, it comes up properly! I'm smiling wryly and thinking I should have upgraded much sooner.
This isn't limited to Adobe software. When you upgrade, new features appear and the environment you're used to changes — perhaps only partially — from the state you've grown comfortable with. And because things change, there are new things you have to learn, so people keep using the old version without upgrading... This is just my personal impression, but this tendency may be especially strong in Japan. (I'm not the type to jump on new things either; I like to move forward cautiously.) I'm not recommending upgrading blindly, but since upgrading can sometimes solve things you currently can't do, when you start to feel something has gotten old, it's worth considering updating your computer, software, website, and so on.









