Dreamweaver 8.O Code-Collapse Feature Sucks

That’s right.  Macromedia took two years to go from Dreamweaver MX to Dreamweaver 8.0, and they threw in some features.  They put in a better WYSIWYG, and supposedly made CSS design easier to use.  Really, wys… is not that helpful because you’re just going to have a browser open to your file anyway and be hitting refresh. Whatever.

 My main complaint is that the code collapse feature in Dreamweaver 8.0 totally sucks.  Yes, it is nice to be able to grab sections of code and shrink them down.  What is not nice is that once they are shrunk you get this totally ridiculous little grey box that shows the first five characters then "…"

 You get this garbage little grey box that you can hover over and see a tool-tip with only ten lines of code in it.  So I collapse say three repetitive sections of DIV tags right?  And three little grey boxes.  Well I realize I need to edit something in one of those code collapsed boxes but i forget which is exactly which.  So i hover over each, slowly and after inspecting ten lines of hard to read code decide on the one.

So then I double click on the little crappy grey box and it expands my code.  Good.  But I finish making my edit, and I want the code to collapse again.  Oh wait.  I have to reselect the entire portion of code and click the little minus sign again.  What’s that?  You say that it is 80 lines of code, and scrolling down that far makes it unclear which closing div tag you should use?  That’s too bad, you’ll have to trouble shoot that by recollapsing a bunch of times. 

 This is a classic example of a great feature, that was totally screwed up by poor design.  Macromedia could have easily added pop-up labels that you can describe what is in a block of collapsed code.  i.e. "This is the Friends and Groups outer box"  But they didn’t, because they suck.

 Then, they are bright enough to create an extra file that keeps track of what portions of code are collapsed when it is closed and re-opened.  But they aren’t bright enough to have it allow you to re-collapse code after you’ve edited something inside of it.  If you haven’t added any new lines, they don’t even have to think about worrying about re-adjusting the top and bottom areas.  It’s so simple.  Anyone who writes code would see right through this crap.

 Two years.  It took them two years for that.

 Update 11/12/05:

Another crappy thing about Dreamweaver:  When you are editing  a site that has files with file extensions that DW does not recognize, it lists them in the Files panel, but you can not open them for editing.  Instead Dreamweaver pops up a helpful little dialog that says, "Can’t find a valid editor for this file extension."  OK, ya, a .engine file hasn’t been associated with anything.  But it is a flippin ascii file!  Why not include an "attempt to open with Dreamweaver?" option?  This is just crappity-crap design.  Boo…