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One of the MAX 2008 sessions I'm most excited about is Danilo Celic's session "Extending the Spry Framework". Danilo's both an engineer for WebAssist as well as a hardcore individual developer, having been writing Dreamweaver extensions since the API was published years ago. If you've been working with Spry but not venturing much 'outside the box', this is exactly the session for you- Danilo will cover custom widgets, transitions and effects by extending the base Spry component set, and how to really take the visual effects to the next level.

For a few bloghints from Danilo to whet your appetite, you can check out his posts "Help for creating custom Spry transitions", and "Upping your Transition Count", and know that he's going to school you much, much deeper in the session. Even if you're more of a general JavaScript coder, this session should have a ton of real-world information you can get tactical with fast. Highly recommended!

A few months back, I made a random Tweet about some internal screencasts I was working on, and got a private ping from Clearleft's user experience guru Andy Budd, asking a bit about what I was recording and what software I was using to do so. That's when I began suspecting that the Clearleft crew had some devious alchemy underway in their Brighton, UK headquarters.

The result of such mad science? Silverback- a Mac-based application for lightweight usability testing. All you need is a Mac laptop and Silverback to capture usability testing sessions on... well, anything that you can run on a Mac. Very cool.

As opposed to Morae, the 10-ton elephant of usability testing, Silverback is lean, mean and focused- and doesn't require you to lug around cameras, tripods and control machines to supplement the testing environment. And in contrast with bulkier screencast production tools like Captivate and ScreenFlow, Silverback focuses on the organizational and functional tools you need to perform quick, lightweight usability tests wherever you can find a subject and perch a laptop (or desktop) with both screen activity and iSight video captured for each user session.

As I'd expect from Andy, the Silverback interface is refreshingly straightforward and direct - with your initial view of the application helping ease new users quickly into the workflow:

I've had the opportunity to test Silverback over the last few weeks, and find it incredibly useful for exactly this type of testing. I can quickly drop my laptop on someone's desk, fire up Dreamweaver CS4 internal builds, and the workflow is great- just click record, center your subject within the iSight correctly, then hit record and step back to let your subject hit the spacebar, and start your test. Management of projects and test sessions is simple and effective- the projects pane on the left helping you navigate the test session list on the top right with your individual session details and annotations artfully presented beneath.

When you're ready to export a session to a more portable/distributable video file, just hit the "Export" button underneath the appropriate video thumbnail, pick a video format and destination, then let the encoding commence. As with all encoding processes this can take some time depending on the size of your session and codec/resolution of choice, but the resulting video will encapsulate both the screen capture and iSight video, along with microphone and computer audio- making it easy to share the results amongst your workgroup.

For a bit more on Silverback from the source, Andy's also put together a screencast to accompany the release- you can view it below to get a walk through the workflow:

Silverback screencast from Jeremy Keith on Vimeo.

A big tip of the hat to Clearleft for creating such a handy, simple tool in Silverback, and one that I'll use quite regularly. For the price ($49.95 USD after a 30-day free demo period- with 10% of your purchase going to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, no less!), it's a flat no-brainer to pick up right now if you do any type of usability work, and worth every penny.

(Oh, and to illustrate the attention to detail Andy and team have put into the app- just horizontally resize silverbackapp.com in your browser window and check out the sweet parallax effect with the hanging vines. Simply gorgeous.)

I sat down a few weeks ago with Andre Charland and had a very candid discussion about the Dreamweaver public beta and how it relates to Ajax designers/developers, and it's just been posted up on the InsideRIA site for your viewing/listening pleasure. We talked about a ton of things, including how I came to be a Dreamweaver product manager, the reasons I was ultra-skeptical of Dreamweaver before coming to Macromedia in 2000, as well as the vision behind the upcoming DW release and how it's new features relate to front-end designers and developers alike. You can check it out below, or over at it's home on the InsideRIA site.

WebAssist launched a very interesting new product for Dreamweaver today - Surveyor - that is focused on building site maps for your projects to assist in both search engine optimization (SEO) as well as navigation.

Not only does Surveyor scan your Dreamweaver site directories and build an XML site map for submission to popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Live Search, etc), but it also allows you to generate a navigational HTML site map for visitors, and the icing on the cake- can remind you to come back every so often and update the site map so that your search result rankings stay fresh. And to close the loop - Surveyor will upload your site map to the correct engines with all the engine-specific metadata intact, making the process pretty painless.

If SEO is a constant nightmare for you and your projects, then Surveyor may be right up your alley. You can check it out here at the WebAssist site. Enjoy!

The annual Adobe MAX conference will be in our neighborhood this year - the Moscone Center/Marriott Hotel in San Francisco - from November 16-19th, and registration just opened today so you can reserve your seat ASAP. There's been a lot of work put in already towards making MAX 08 the event to remember in 2008, with a few late-breaking changes to note for this year's conference:

• A new 'Envision' track for movers and shakers evaluating the Adobe Platform roadmap
• 30% more hands-on lab sessions, including the new MEGA-LAB (holding 300!)
• 4 parallel 'unconferences' (2 for designers, 2 for developers)
• 250 sessions to choose from
• And of course, sneak peeks and surprises galore, as you'd expect.

I'll have plenty to show at MAX myself this year (Dreamweaver being a large part of that), and although the final session and track schedules haven't been announced yet, what I've seen of the content so far is absolutely mind-blowing. Hope to see you there!

Although we released a Whole Lot of documentation to support Spry 1.6.x along with the framework that illustrates how it can be used responsibly, I still get asked regularly whether Spry can really be used unobtrusively. The first thing developers usually notice when looking at Spry is the spry:* custom attributes sprinkled throughout the sample code, but there are certainly more elegant ways to inject those attributes at runtime above and beyond those brute force examples. If you have similar questions about how to use Spry, check out this example over at Greg Rewis' blog, which uses the sweet Spry element selector to apply those Spry accordion panel attributes unobtrusively, resulting in a clean, validating markup structure that progressively enhances itself with JavaScript. Nice!

Although it's long been rumored, today the news was officially delivered- GoLive will no longer be sold as of today (April 28th, 2008), and the focus will shift to Dreamweaver long-term for Adobe's professional web design & development customers. This is news that I'm reasonably certain most GoLive users saw coming as far back as the CS3 launch- when Dreamweaver replaced GoLive in the Creative Suite packages - but it's good to finally have an official word on the matter. GoLive (versions 5, 6, CS2 and 9) customers can take advantage of a $199 cross-grade special (same price as a Dreamweaver upgrade, basically) to pick up Dreamweaver CS3, which means there'll be a lot of GoLive customers considering Dreamweaver now.

There's been a lot of speculation on if and when this would happen - and if so, why - so I wanted to at least give a little perspective on this from my vantage point - as a long-time Dreamweaver team member - on two of the main concerns I've heard around Dreamweaver taking the helm of our web design products.

Lack of Competition

Ever since the Macromedia acquisition, I've heard the pretty regular concern that Adobe's competitors were systematically being eliminated, leaving the competitive landscape around our products bleak and quite frankly - non-competitive. Honestly, I couldn't see that more differently - competitors are all around if you care to look for them- from lightweight web design/development apps like Coda, CSSEdit and others, to full-blown IDEs like Visual Studio and Eclipse. For design-centric web developers, apps like Freeway and the reasonably-newer Expression Web are viable options. GoLive was a worthy competitor, but lately we've even more competing tools to consider as we build out Dreamweaver's roadmap, not less. That can only be a good thing for the competitive web design landscape - and Dreamweaver's future within it - in my opinion.

Coders vs Designers

Web design has increasingly become a more technical discipline over the years, and Dreamweaver's secret to success was always to follow what the pro web designers were doing on a project and workflow basis, and enable that within our tools. We occasionally hear criticism that Dreamweaver isn't 'WYSIWYG enough', or needs to support more drag-and-drop features and get away from the code. But that's not what the pro web design market has been telling us - web design is not like print design, or even Flash design. When was the last time you needed to hack your InDesign files to print correctly on that one, finicky printer? Web browsers are OUR printers, and they sure as heck don't always play as nicely with one another- let alone render the same way even on the best of days. Visual tools can get you 90% of the way there with the current browser landscape- but that remaining 10% of your headache is almost always code-based- a browser hack inserted into the stylesheet or perhaps some judicious markup-juggling to get that layout working correctly. And when this bites you, you absolutely, positively, have to have access to your code. Plain and simple. Sure, a lot of print designers have become accustomed to GoLive's more visual model, but at the end of the day Dreamweaver has to serve it's primary market - professional web designers and developers - and the market spoke quite loudly on that subject years ago. We're just following their lead, honestly.

But I'm sure there's lots of good ideas to consider now too, do you have favorite GoLive features that you'd like the DW team to consider going forward? If so, please use our bug/wish list form here to send them in for consideration (always the most direct path to getting a request into the teams here, FYI):

http://www.adobe.com/go/wish

So What's Next?

This will undoubtedly be a period of transition as there's a lot of GoLive users who are now considering Dreamweaver, and we'd like to make sure that your transition's a smooth one. I strongly recommend checking out the resources we've made available at the following URL:

http://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver/switch

These include:

• The GoLive to Dreamweaver migration extension - helping you convert the structure of your legacy sites to a format that can be imported and managed by Dreamweaver.
• GoLive to Dreamweaver Site Migration guide - written by GoLive experts Adam Pratt and Lynn Grillo.
• Training Video from Lynda.com - giving tips and tricks for getting up to speed quickly with Dreamweaver, including the migration process

Indeed, there's a lot of areas of difference between GoLive and Dreamweaver, but hopefully these bits of info will help you make the most sense of them quickly.

For the Dreamweaver team, we've already seen many of the GoLive engineers join our ranks, who are all contributing quite a bit to the next release of Dreamweaver already. It's been a pretty smooth transition internally, and is resulting in one amazing team. However, I realize that this news may be much more upsetting to you, but sincerely hope that the the transition is as painless as possible. Let us know how we can help?

I've been pretty hectic between travel and SxSW the last couple weeks, but a few cool items of note may have slipped past. Catching up now...

• Kuler just got an update today, with a feature I've been drooling over since I heard about it a few weeks back- color extraction! You can now upload an image, and have Kuler extract the dominant color theme from it. Simply awesome feature- saves me from my old "Posterize > sample colors to a swatch" workflow in Photoshop. Make sure and give the Kuler team your feedback, too.
• The Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced at SxSW last week that the Dreamweaver Task Force is being renamed and expanded to the Adobe Task Force, covering a wider range of our products. Don't fear, though- our historical cooperation with WaSP from the Dreamweaver team is alive and kicking as always, and will continue into the foreseeable future. I love those guys for keeping us honest over the years!
• Chris Charlton has been working overtime again and sneaked a peek at his upcoming DW extension for Drupal developers - the Dreamweaver Themer's Kit extension for Drupal. I swear that guy never sleeps, if you've been following his developer site xtnd.us you know exactly what I'm talking about. You can also check the Adobe Technologies group he manages out over at groups.drupal.org. Get some rest, Chris- we need you for the 4th quarter, man!

Anyway, since I didn't feel like posting yet another dissection of what went wrong in Sarah Lacy's interview of Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg last week (although I missed the beginning of the interview, I was drawn to the trainwreck ending like a moth to a flame), or general 'wish you were here' posts from SXSW, so I hope these tidbits are a little lighter on the fluff. If you want the blow-by-blow from last week in Austin, you can rewind my Twitter stream, after all.

So you like those fancy-schmancy Spry accordions, but have the need to deep-link into closed accordion panels from an external page? That's a pretty obvious use case usability-minded designers (and their clients) may require, and Dreamweaver and PHP guru David Powers has a great tutorial on just that topic on his Foundation Dreamweaver blog - "Linking to a non-default panel".

If you're strictly using the visual Spry tools in Dreamweaver to author, you're probably missing a lot of the hidden gems in SpryURLUtils.js (included with the Spry 1.6 update), and this is a great tutorial for taking that first dive into the extra goodies v1.6 provides.

The 'Hot News' page on Apple.com has some good news for iPhone owners- according to Steve Jobs, you can get your hands on an official iPhone/iPod Touch SDK in February '08. Reportedly the delays were mostly security-related concerns, as Nokia's third-party application signing plans were referenced (Adobe AIR M5 applications also require code signing, for what it's worth), but you can read the short but sweet note and the details on Apple's site right here.