Yes, I signed them as well :)

I'm sure they'll be worth some moolah one of these days when I RULE THE WORLD!!! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA

As part of my new job, I got myself a MacBook pro and have been running Bootcamp on it over the last few days. All in all the experience is good, but there are issues with Windows running on the MacBook that bother me (bad sound drivers, and the fact that the clock resets on each startup). However, before I installed BootCamp I spent quite a bit of time on the Mac and got over some of my "floating windows" phobias. To that end, I'm considering going all the way and switching to OSX. So to get to my point, is there anyone out there that's recently been through this that can give me some pointers on what I might miss?

My biggest concern is not finding a worthy replacement for Beyond Compare. I absolutely love the program, and haven't been able to find anything comparable on the Mac. I've seen other diff tools, but nothing with the feature set that Beyond Compare has (saved sessions, full folder tree synchronizations, folder tree comparison reports, exlucsions, rule sets, etc. etc.). Any suggestions in this area would be fantastic, because honestly, the lack of a good Mac file diff tool would keep me on the PC for good...

While I was in Ojai recording the Dreamweaver 8 Beyond the Basics title for lynda.com there were some reports from the Ventura County Star writing an article on lynda.com. They wanted to take a few photos of someone doing a recording, and they ended up using a shot of me on the front page of the Business section of their February 15th article. See mom and dad, I really do do real work :). Click the image for a larger version.

Read the article here (requires free registration).

With little fanfare (blow your trumpets please!) Macromedia Adobe introduced a new feature in the Dreamweaver 8 updater regarding template paths (see the full technote for more information).

What this means for us lowly developers, is that if we're using includes or folder specfic images and such inside Dreamweaver, we can have each file in a directory include another file inside the child page's directory... As I read that again it doesn't make a lick of sense, so here's an example:

Let's assume that every folder in your site relates to a specific section. And let's assume that you want to have a section image unique to each section. When you're looking at the rum section in the /rum folder, you want /rum/section.gif to display. When you're perusing the whiskey section at /whiskey/index.cfm, you want /whiskey/section.gif to display. A simple request right? Well it wasn't an easy task to accomplish before the latest updater.

Now, if you link to any file inside the Templates directory from a .dwt file, then when child pages are updated, any links to pages inside the Templates folder will not be rewritten. So let's assume the following directory structure:

wwwroot
|--Rum
|  |--index.cfm
|  |--section.gif
|--Templates
|  |--SiteLayout.dwt.cfm
|  |--section.gif
|--Whiskey
   |--index.cfm
   |--section.gif

Inside SiteLayout.dwt.cfm you have an <img> tag like so:

<img src="section.gif" />

Now, when you create a child page from the SiteLayout.dwt.cfm file, that image link won't be <img src="../Templates/section.gif"> as it would have been in Dreamweaver 8.0. Instead, it will be <img src="section.gif />, which means that each page based on the template will link to the section.gif file in its own folder.

Now that's just good stuff I tell you... If you don't like that feature however, you can turn it off by editing your Site Definition, clicking on the Templates category, and unchecking the "Don't rewrite document relative paths" checkbox. This will revert Dreamweaver 8.01 to Dreamweaver 8's default behavior.

Have fun!

I finished up the new Dreamweaver 8 Beyond the Basics title for lynda.com on Friday. After 4 solid days in a little sound-proof room, it's time to head back home and catch up on all of the emails and questions from readers. The Beyond the Basics title covers advanced template usage, building multi-column CSS layouts, using some rapid coding techniques in Dreamweaver you might not have known where there, as well as a chapter on getting your feet wet with dynamic development in Dreamweaver 8.

Before I left I also recorded a few pick ups for the Dynamic Development with Dreamweaver 8 title, which should hopefully be released in the next week or two.