12 Adobe CS4 shortcuts you never knew existed
Tips and tricks from Paul Burnett, Adobe's Senior Evangelist
8. Update your webpage in Dreamweaver
You can now work on a dynamic web page in Dreamweaver and continue updating it without leaving the authoring environment, with the addition of the Live View and Live Code tools.
Live View lets you see what your layout will look like under real-world browser conditions, and how it will behave, while Live Code works with Live View to show how the code is executed. For developers, this means no more wasting time bouncing between Dreamweaver and a browser when building a webpage.
9. Find and amend code faster using Dreamweaver
The new Code Navigator (Ctrl/Cmd>Alt>click) is a smart pop-up window that displays the links to all the CSS code sources affecting your current selection. It shows you how the rules are cascaded and are affecting the HTML elements.
Clicking on a CSS style will take you to that rule in your style sheet, where you can amend the instruction – this means no more searching style sheets to find the rule you want.
10. View all the external files in Dreamweaver
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Dreamweaver documents now display a Related Files bar, which presents the names and links of all the files related to your webpage. This allows you to see all the individual elements – the JavaScript, CSS files or SSI – without leaving the design environment, and makes for far easier file switching.
11. Create standards-compliant code in Fireworks
Improvements to Fireworks CS4 mean you don't have to be a web developer to create a web page. You can design all the CSS in Fireworks, and then export standards-compliant HTML and CSS, with Fireworks converting any rich symbols to their HTML equivalent.
There's also a new Export to PDF feature, allowing you to export a document and maintain hotspot linked pages.
12. Save large files faster
Finally, file saving is now asynchronous, so you can perform other tasks while saving a large file, while speed increases have aided bitmap and vector operations.
For more tips and tutorials on using the new features in Adobe CS4, pick up the new issue of Computer Arts Projects, or visit the Computer Arts forum.
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Like this article? Then check out 10 seriously useful Photoshop tutorials
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Julia specialises in ecommerce at Future. For the last four years, she’s split her time between leading TechRadar’s crack team of deal editors - covering all the biggest sales of the year including Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Amazon Prime Day - and helping the audiences of Future’s consumer tech and lifestyle brands (TechRadar, Tom's Guide, T3, Marie Claire, Woman & Home and more) find the best products and services for their needs and budget.
A former editor of global design website Creative Bloq, she has over 15 years’ experience in online and print journalism, and was part of the team that launched TechRadar way back in the day. When she isn't reviewing mattresses (she’s tested more than she cares to remember), or sharing tips on how to save money in the latest sales, she can usually be found writing about anything from green energy to graphic design.