Last night at the Rocky Mountain Adobe Users Group, I gave a presentation on the newly-released beta versions of Adobe Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Acrobat.com to familiarize our members with some of the awesome new features of these tools.

Watch the Presentation via a Connect Recording, and view the the slides.

Amanda’s Take on The Betas

Dreamweaver: I’ve moved to the beta and don’t plan to look back to CS3. Everything seems stable, and features like the Code Navigator and Live View have already changed the way I work. I’m hooked. Something that I didn’t mention at the meeting that is also awesome in this latest version is that Dreamweaver no longer generates deprecated HTML. Along with Dreamweaver’s now superior CSS generation, JS extraction and code hinting, these features are sure to make my code squeaky clean. Or, at least clean enough to eat off of.

Fireworks: The beta isn’t quite as refined as the Dreamweaver one and I’ve caught more than a few hiccups while evaluating it. My favorite one being that if you export to HTML and CSS, it saves the HTML file with a GIF extension. Still, there is some real promise here. Most of all, I hope that the improvements to the vector tools are an indication of what is to come with Illustrator. Love new goodies in the Paths palette like sharpen and fillet corners. Also, the ability to export an AIR package or interactive PDF is awesome for prototyping. Sure to change our work flow in the future.

Acrobat.com: All this for free? Really? Hands-down the most awesome feature for me is Connect Now - a pretty robust version of Connect that allows you to host a meeting with three people (including yourself) for free. Screen sharing, remote control, chat, whiteboard, it’s all there. And free!! Also, I’m not a Buzzword convert yet, but think that it’s one slick program. Secret feature: generate as many PDFs from Buzzword as you’d like for free. Don’t just limit yourself to the five free ones in the main navigation.

Presentation Slides

For those of you who attended the meeting, you’ll notice that I only showed three of these. I thought I’d share the whole deck on 15 here.