Alternatives To Adobe Dreamweaver For Mac
Not keen on paying a monthly subscription for Adobe Dreamweaver CC? Well, if you're a PC user, Microsoft has made its Expression Web 4.0 software free of charge - and here illustrator, artist and graphic designer Stefan Lindblad explains why it offers an alternative worth investigating...
I've called Adobe re this and related problems and they found a problem with the Creative Cloud app, but this hasn't made Dreamweaver work any better. Even before Creative Cloud it would crash a lot. This isn't a problem with my computer, it's a problem with your program. Products like CoffeeCup, HotDog, FrontPage, GoLive, and many others filled the market, and many web-based WYSIWYG editors emerged as well. Among the more successful was Macromedia (later Adobe) Dreamweaver, which was among my personal favorites for many years. Popular open source Alternatives to Adobe Dreamweaver for Mac. Explore 16 Mac apps like Adobe Dreamweaver, all suggested and ranked by the AlternativeTo user community.
Adobe Dreamweaver Alternatives Updated on May 17, 2018 by Howard Steele Adobe Dreamweaver is an offline web building software, which was created with the needs of professionals in mind. Today, we would like to show some alternatives for another Adobe product – Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver is a well-known application for website development, available for PC or MAC, and is usable as either a WYSIWYG or direct code editor.
I started using Macromedia Dreamweaver when version 1.0 was released. Happy as you can be, I started using it from day one. After half a year I got the hang of it.
My first website had been created by a friend of mine, Ingemar. It looked great and I was happy. But of course I had to update it on my own quite regularly. And so I started using Dreamweaver 1.0 and continued to upgrade with new versions until up to a few years ago.
My version at the time was too old to upgrade. So I started looking for an equivalent program. After several tests of programs such as Coffee Cup and NVU, I finally discovered Microsoft Expression Web - in those days, a boxed DVD version.
Within a year of the release of Expression Web 3.0, the new version, 4.0 was released, and Microsoft gave existing 3.0 users a free upgrade. Then in 2012, Microsoft decided to make Expression Web 4 free for everybody to use*. You can download the full program directly from Microsoft's own website.
[*Ed's note: Be aware that technical support is only available for customers who purchased the paid-for version of Expression Web, which Microsoft is no longer developing; no support will be offered to free downloaders.]
Looks familiar
Anyone who's used Dreamweaver versions prior to CC will feel quite comfortable with the overall user interface and workspace of Expression Web. The UI layout looks quite similar.
Open Source Alternatives For Adobe Dreamweaver
For starters, you have the code view and design view, and the combination of both. And you'll find all the panels and tools are conveniently at hand. You activate or deactivate them either directly on the panels and palettes or via the menu.
HTML5 features
Relatively early on, Microsoft saw that HTML5 was going to be the future of web design. So they quickly added HTML 5 capabilities to Expression Web 3.0 in the run up to the release of Internet Explorer 9.
Microsoft Expression Web 4.0 also includes intellisense for the complete HTML 5 specification. You have Intellisense CSS3 draft and support for all CSS properties in the CSS Properties Palette. For example, in the Style dialog you have support for selected CSS Properties such as Border Radius.
Look closely at panels such as CSS Properties Palette, Apply Styles and Manage Styles and you'll see that overall, Expression Web makes it easy to move around the world of modern CSS.
Web graphics
The web is no fun without graphics. And it's easy to create them in your image editor of choice - myself, I use CorelDraw and Corel Photo-Paint - and apply them to your documents in Expression Web.
Expression Web 4.0 also supports custom workspaces, which means you can move around and then save the current workspace customization as a workspace of your own. This is found under the Panels menu. Plus you can also customize your own toolbars, so they're better suited for your own needs and workflow. This feature is pretty neat. You'll find it under the View menu.
With 4.0 a Snippets Panel was added to the program, allowing you to store and access snippets folders in a hierarchy. You can have dozens of handy snippets in various languages, and automatically convert and load the custom snippets you build.
No competition
So would it be worth me getting an alternative program such as Dreamweaver instead? Looking at the competition as it stands right now, and the needs I have, I see no real reason to look for a replacement tool right now.
Of course, with the web developing at lightning pace, and software being continually reinvented, one day that may change and I may have to move forward. But currently there's no reason to abandon the program that I continue to use and love. Especially because it's free.
- Words:Stefan Lindblad
- Photography:Mia Palenque
Stefan Lindblad is a freelance illustrator and graphic designer based in Stockholm, Sweden and working for wide variety of clients. He blogs regularly here about a range of design-related issues.
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Have you found a decent free alternative to a popular paid tool? Share your experiences in the column below!
Hey fellas! Do you want to get rid of your old school web development tools like Dreamweaver? Are you looking for some alternatives to it? Congrats you have landed the right place that will help you out. Dreamweaver is unmistakably powerful software for both learners, and seasoned experts. But due to its extravagant price users are looking forward toward Dreamweaver alternatives. Hence, exclusively for all our readers we have researched and compiled a list of top 10 Dreamweaver alternatives.
But before going to the list let us find out reasons behind switching to other alternatives of Dreamweaver. Therefore, it’s worth marking some of the bad highlights about Dreamweaver are mentioned here :-
- Confusing Interface
- Steep Learning Curve
- The WYSIWIG lies
- Bulky Dynamic Code
- Badly Written Code Snippets
- Undefined CSS Styling
- Not in Full Control of your Code
- 10% of Full Functionality Actually Useful
- Very Expensive
Also Read: Best Adobe After Effects Alternatives
Contents
- 2 Best Dreamweaver Alternatives
Top 10 Free Dreamweaver Alternatives
Let’s have a look at top 10 Adobe Dreamweaver alternatives:
- Microsoft’s Expression Web 4.0
- Aptana Studio
- BlueGriffon
- Kompozer
- Amaya
- SeaMonkey
- Aloha Editor
- Bluefish
- OpenBEXI
- Quanta Plus
Well, I hope you all wish to explore a bit more about all these alternatives. So here are a few details about each one of the following:
Best Dreamweaver Alternatives
Lets now have a detailed look at these alternatives.
Microsoft Expression Web 4.0
Microsoft’s Expression Web 4.0 resembles some of the earlier Dreamweaver versions to a great extent. In case, it might prove pretty intuitive if you have been using Dreamweaver for so long.
Various feature of this alternative includes a customizable toolbars and offers design and code views. Along with the HTML 5 capability the software also supports latest design options, CSS Properties Palette, CSS management etc. Likewise, it makes light work of positioning graphics.
Goto: Microsoft’s Expression Web 4.0
Aptana Studio
Aptana Studio like Dreamweaver is an open source development tool for the open web.It is based on the open-source Eclipse project. It features different tools for assisting in HTML and CSS authoring, including code coloring and completion, debugging, and outlining of documents. It even supports JavaScript.
This feature makes Aptana Studia a strong tool for developing more complex web applications. Hence it’s more of an advanced IDE specializing in web development.
Goto: Aptana Studio
BlueGriffon
BlueGriffon is a free, open source, WYSIWYG editor. FTP is available only with an add-on. Supported features of BlueGriffon includes page preview, spell checking, templates, web fonts.
Plus it includes SVG editor for drawing vector graphics. Though some features such as a project manager, CSS style-sheet editor, and full-screen viewer cost you for money but there are many features that are free. It’s interface is similar to a word processor. It is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Goto: BlueGriffon
KOMPOZER
A Mozilla project, the last stable update of KompoZer (0.7.10) was in 2007, suggesting like Expression 4.0, this project has run its course. KompoZer is totally free as a download. It is a fully WYSIWYG editor which is compatible with Windows.
Unlike Dreamweaver It doesn’t allow server-side scripting. But KompoZer allows you to create templates and alos it let you open any number of pages concurrently. A CSS editor and an HTML validator is offered by KompoZer.
Goto: KOMPOZER
Amaya
Amaya is free, open source, comhttp://www.w3.org/Amaya/patible with Windows, Mac and Linux. Features a WYSIWYG editor, spell checking, page preview, SVG, and MathML. Frames, Java, JavaScript, XSLT, XForms, RSS, or Atom aren’t really supported by Amaya. Plus CSS2 is also only partially supported. Despite of all those constraints it requires a high-resolution monitor, to view all features. There is no FTP support, and it is not an intuitive interface, because many standard keys such as HOME and END do not move the cursor to the start and end of lines, as other editors do.
Goto: Amaya
SeaMonkey
SeaMonkey is a community continuation of what was once a Mozilla-produced internet application suite. While Mozilla decided to narrow its focus to individual projects, SeaMonkey continues to make regular releases of its full suite, which includes SeaMonkey Composer, a WYSIWYG HTML editor.
Goto: SeaMonkey
Aloha Editor
Aloha is yet another strong candidate in the list of top 10 Dreamweaver alternatives. It offers HTML5 editing and compatibility with current browsers.
Also, it features a “floating” toolbar that alters depending on which part of your site you are working on. It is an extremely viable Dreamweaver alternative.
Alternatives To Adobe Dreamweaver For Mac
Goto: Aloha Editor
Mac Dreamweaver Alternative
Bluefish – Adobe Dreamweaver Alternative for Mac
Bluefish is free, open source, compatible with Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, and Unix systems. There is no WYSIWYG editor feature and you cannot do shared editing. Multiple browsers are useful to check work. However it is similar to Dreamweaver’s support for developing HTML, XHTML, CSS, etc, and in addition it supports Google Go, Vala, ColdFusion, Ruby and Shell.
It has auto-recovery of changes after a crash as well as a FTP upload, server-side scripting, spell checker and page preview feature.
Check now: Bluefish
Free Alternatives To Adobe Dreamweaver
OpenBEXI
This is an open source, free, WYSIWYG editor compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux with a browser-based interface. Designed to drag and drop widgets including images, text, graphs, and more. Includes FTP upload and allows server-side scripting.
However, it is difficult to get objects to work when added to a page and you need to use a server. It allows for creating a Mac style menu, you can create line, pie and bar charts plus it supports RSS. However, it does not support MathML, Xpath, or shared editing.
Goto: OpenBEXI
Quanta Plus
Quanta Plus is a free, open source, Linux-based program. It closely resembles the Dreamweaver environment, with similar features for supporting JavaScript, CSS2, XForms, RSS, etc. It also posses features syntax highlighting support for PHP, HTML, JavaScript, Perl, XML and others. Though, it doesn’t support SVG or HTML5. There are drop down menus and auto completion for parsing linked documents from CSS to PHP.
Goto: Quanta Plus
So if you want a Dreamweaver alternative without all the bells and whistles, these might be considerable options for you. Here comes the time to bid bye. This was our list of top 10 best Dreamweaver alternatives. Drop down your favorite one from the above list. In case we missed any potential alternative let us know through comment section. Keep visiting our website for more such stuffs.