We're down to the last major pieces of Adobe CS5 Web Premium, but last doesn't always mean least. OR DOES IT??? HMMMM??? With that as a spectacular teaser, let's spend our final installment looking at two holdovers from those halcyon Macromedia days of yore: Dreamweaver, the venerable web site building tool, and Fireworks, the oft-overlooked prototyping and vector/bitmap editing powerhouse.

It only took the better part of a decade, but Dreamweaver CS4 finally adds enough features and enhancements to earn a reprieve from what I thought would be the inevitable call to nuke it from orbit. And while it doesn't get all the way to where I'd personally like to see the product, Dreamweaver CS4 seems to have reversed its slow (and sad) decline, and for the first time in a very, very long time, I've come to like where things are going.

Such is the nature of the upgrade cycle: just as creative types were getting used to the CS3 line, Adobe goes and announces CS4. And while you've likely seen myriad press releases and first looks and other introductory stuff by now, here are a few "below the fold" observations based on the the experiences I've had with the CS4 betas over the last several weeks.

Regardless of what you may specifically think of the CS3 iteration of the venerable Dreamweaver visual Web editor, even the most hardened skeptics would probably be forced to (grudgingly) agree that the integration of Adobe's Spry framework for Ajax into Dreamweaver CS3 is, to put it very technically, pretty freaking cool.

It's the moment that a whole bunch of Web designers and producers (especially those with Intel Macs) have been waiting many a moon for: Adobe's CS3 Design and Web suites are finally shipping. Today, we're going to be checking out the Web Premium bundle, which features former Macromedia products finally brought together with traditional Adobe stalwarts in an all-star lineup of Web production bliss. That's the idea, anyway—out in the field, the Web Premium suite is a blend of fantastic features and worthwhile upgrades mixed with a sizable amount of disappointment.

Like the weekly serials of old, we left off last time with a cliffhanger. What treats were there to be found in the rest of the CS3 Production Premium bundle? Which goodies in After Effects, Encore, Photoshop Extended, and even OnLocation and Ultra would appeal to motion graphics and interactive folk? Well, you didn't have to wait too long to find out, so let's get this sucka done.

I was somewhat skeptical about what the forthcoming Adobe CS3 Production Premium bundle would offer outside of Flash and After Effects; after all, I have precisely zero skills when it comes to the "front end" of production (shooting, capture, editing, etc.). My interests lie squarely down the line (motion graphics, interactivity, Web distribution), so my initial thought was that the entire bundle might be of limited total value to someone like me. However, after seeing and using a pre-release version of the suite for myself, it turns out that there are a lot of hidden gems in surprising places.

Even though I'm only a casual Dreamweaver user these days, I get excited every time a new version of the legendary visual editor is released, hoping against hope that this is the one that gets me to abandon my now stubbornly-ingrained habit of hand-coding HTML and CSS and back into really (ab)using the product that I loved so dearly in the late 90s. It's now Dreamweaver CS3's turn at bat, so let's find out how it does in its first plate appearance as an Adobe product.

Unless you've been living under a rock (or perhaps in a spacious yet private cave), you very likely have heard the news by now that Adobe has announced approximately 4,927 new versions of the Creative Suite 3 line of products. For our purposes here today, however, I want to focus on two things: the word "Web" and the number 13. That is, we're gunning for the CS3 Web Premium bundle and 13 of the things I keep coming back to as neat-o new features.

With the announcement of the brand spankin' new CS3 line, we now know that Dreamweaver has replaced GoLive as the visual Web editor of record for Adobe's bundled products. So what can long time and first time users alike expect from Dreamweaver CS3? Let's peel back the curtain and take a gander at some of the new and notable items in Dreamweaver CS3.