Macromedia has unveiled sweeping plans to upgrade its world-leading portfolio of Web design software.


All three applications - Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Dreamweaver UltraDev - are moving to version 4 in what is probably the most significant upgrade project of the year for Web designers . The trio boasts substantial new design and workflow-orientated features, as well as revamped Macromedia-standard interfaces.


Dreamweaver
Dreamweaver is the world's most popular professional Web design application aimed primarily at designers. It combines an intuitive WYSIWYG design view with under-the-bonnet coding tools and a fully-featured site management system.


Among the new features hailed for this latest iteration is a Layout View, similar to WYSIWYG, but which behaves much more like a traditional print layout tool (à la QuarkXPress). This, combined with split-window access to a traditional text editor for coding, provides the designer with more complete, diverse and flexible authoring environments, from code-free to hand-coded. For the latter, Dreamweaver 4 also includes javascript syntax colouring and a debugger, as well as a complete code reference and customisable shortcuts.


On a purely design level, there are new toolbox features for quickly adding visual text and navigation buttons in the Flash format, which often offers better file sizes than static GIF or JPEG graphics. Even better, you won't need Flash installed on your system to make use of this feature. Developing features for collaborative work have become a high priority for Macromedia - to facilitate this, Dreamweaver 4 includes a full Asset Manager, like the Flash library, complete with features for creating and maintaining a shared resource of visuals, colours, codes and so on.


The new Macromedia-standard interface won't be alien to existing Dreamweaver users, but does include a toolbar with quick access to different views, the document title, browser previews and so on. The Colour Picker also falls in line with the Flash 5 style. Also joining the party are Site Reporting for fixing errors, increased configuration and customisation options, in addition to WebDAV integration for enhanced third-party cutomisation. This enables specialised versions of Dreamweaver to be built for specific work areas.


• For more on Dreamweaver, check out our in-depth Dreamweaver 4 picture story


• Read about Fireworks 4 here


UltraDev
UltraDev comes with the full Dreamweaver feature-set, but with additional tools for the back-end developer. These are aimed at connecting Web pages into a database for large-scale sites. The software provides a visual environment to make this possible, with auto-coding.


The latest version of UltraDev is, in fact, version 1, but since the upgrade is to boast the full Dreamweaver feature, Macromedia has decided to vault confusion and shunt UltraDev to version 4, too.


Apart from the core new DW features, the UltraDev upgrade is to benefit from a simpler system for setting up your initial database connection, remote connectivity, so you cache database content on your local hard drive, rather than running the troubles associated with developing over a network; and a server behaviour builder, which creates reusable back-end codes.


Most appealing to the upstart designer could be the drag-and-drop behaviours, which enable you to develop database-driven HTML code with little or no understanding of the underlying scripting.