TodCon8: Birds of a Feather with Paul Gubbay and Scott Fegette

Another day dawns in TodCon8. This time we're sitting in the main room talking with Paul Gubbay, engineering manager for Dreamweaver and Scott Fegette from the developer relations team at Adobe. It's good to see the openness of Macromedia carrying over to the Adobe world. It's not often that you get to sit with representatives of the company and bitch--I mean discuss--the features that you like and don't like about the products that you use.

I've missed a couple of questions already, so I'll try to catch up here. We're discussing Spry, and the reason why it was released on Adobe Labs and how the company looks at getting early user feedback in order to drive product development. Scott related how the experience of getting comunity input early in the creation of Flash led to a much stronger release when Flash 8 was finally rolled out.

Spry is a framework for building Ajax applications, with the goal to make integration of advanced Javascript functions easier for Dreamweaver users. Spry is built with "front end developers in mind" and the company has gotten important feedback that will help them determine the direction. Paul related the process of developing an application like Dreamweaver as a short period of innovation followed by a much longer period of testing, bug squashing, and feature lockdown.

Update: For more on Spry, see Paul's article at Adobe DevNet.

A fair amount of discussion was centered around things that Dreamweaver doesn't support such as PHP 5, Ruby on Rails, and source control.

Some discussion ensued around the future of Dreamweaver focused on better tools for the hard-core coders of the world versus those who only want a visual design environment. Some, myself included, would almost prefer to see two versions of Dreamweaver as there was in version 4--with one version for working in the design environment and a more robust coding environment in what might be called a "Pro" version. Of course, the challenge for Adobe is how to please such a disparate group of customers.

More talk around other Adobe products followed, including beefs with things like font management in Fireworks, the pending demise of Freehand, and the ability to edit paths in Fireworks that is more like what is possible in Flash.

Some other suggestions:

1. Better pricing options for Breeze
2. Improved management of sites, including the option to group sites by category, last used, and so forth.
3. Better support for mobile devices and templates that are geared to different devices.
4. Better font management in Fireworks.

Another excellent session!