Not for the first time, I was happily authoring CSS and Dreamweaver CS3 crashed. Turns out, it doesn’t have to be specifically CSS, but that was my situation anyway.

The crash

It’s all too familiar: this is DW after all, and those of us who have used it from the start will know the pedigree. But I try to restart the program anyway: it’s 1am and I don’t need this. Nope, fail. Dreamweaver CS3 won’t start on Windows XP. In these times of quad processors and 32-bit colour, has the long-exorcised ghost of DW’s buggy past returned to haunt us?

The following options were available:

• Abuse someone at Adobe
• Reinstall Dreamweaver
• Try to clean out the config files so that Dreamweaver has to create new ones on restart (an old and occasionally successful solution)

And the answer? None of the above.

The fix turned out to be simple, though somewhat obscure. I shall elaborate in a moment, but first I must attribute my source. In August 2007, Adobe Community Expert and author David Powers sussed out this profoundly ugly problem in the Macromedia.Dreamweaver Google Group. At the time, it was undocumented elsewhere and not particularly easy to find with bland keywords in search engines.

The cause of the crash

Apparently, an install of Dreamweaver CS3 (mine is currently v9.0 Build 3481) crashes if you edit a file to exactly a multiple of 8,192 bytes. Not a byte more, not a byte less. The chances of this happening are probably fairly small: to edit a file to the exact size at the same moment that DW does some processing and gets upset.

Don’t believe me? I wouldn’t have either in your position. But here’s what happened: I’m editing a document of any supported format, I’m just about to change a particular value and suddenly it crashes. So I checked out David’s comment above and, lo and behold:

So now what?

If you have this bug, from here it’s quick and easy to escape. Don’t bother trying to do anything with Dreamweaver CS3 because as long as your file is a multiple of 8,192 bytes, you ain’t going nowhere.

Step 1. If you were working within a Site, you can test if this bug was behind the crash

If you were editing your file within a defined Site, read on. Otherwise, you can skip to 2.

In Windows Explorer, temporarily rename the folder that contains your Site, so that Dreamweaver CS3 starts successfully, asking you to Manage Sites… because of course it can’t find your original folder.

If you were to point Manage Sites… to the new folder name, Dreamweaver CS3 would crash again, so just exit the app for now. You can now be pretty sure you’ve encountered this filesize bug.

If DW doesn’t start properly after this step, then you have some other problem and I’m sorry your visit here didn’t help.

Step 2. Edit the file that caused the crash outside of Dreamweaver CS3

Next, in a different text editor such as Notepad, increase the filesize of the file that you were editing when DW crashed – just by adding a bit of whitespace, for example – and then resave it. You could also decrease the file size by deleting whitespace, but of course you risk repeating the bug when you work on the file again later or indeed, you might not have anything to safely delete, so I’d recommend increasing instead.

Now, having altered the file, be sure to check that your filesize is indeed no longer a multiple of 8,192kb.

If you were working within a Site as described in Step 1, you can now rename the folder of your Site back to its original name in Windows Explorer.

Restart Dreamweaver CS3 and you should be back in action. I hope it worked for you too!

Afterthought

As you can probably see, there are quite a few satisfied customers in the Responses below, from Denmark to Chile. So why not let me know if you had this problem too and if your situation was a little different, please add to the knowledge.

And finally, this incident jogged my memory of another oddball software behaviour I encountered once in the early days of Office 2007 for Windows, because it too was about processing bytes and coming out with the wrong result. Check out this anomaly with Excel 2007: if you multiply 850 by 77.1 you get 100,000. The real answer? 65,535 of course, a juicy, meaningful number for aficionados of binary computing! [15 April 2008: I tested this again recently and it appears to have been patched - Mike]

Flash is ten years old, as the BBC reports, and for any Internet technology still around after a decade that’s a considerable achievement.

When I started out in web design, it was almost the only medium I worked in, reflecting the tastes of the time. That was before the Flash backlash, led by the arch-headline-grabber himself Jakob Nielsen’s vociferous take on the matter.

Since then, the paths of Flash and I have diverged considerably. I rarely work with it nowadays.

Inappropriate Flash harms user experience

I haven’t seen developers breaking new ground lately, in the way every week used to bring extensions of Flash’s seemingly limitless capabilities in two dimensions.

Just at the time when Flash was in the corner licking its wounds, good old HTML enjoyed a renaissance with the adoption of web standards and increased accessibility. Today, JavaScript has taken markup into orbit and in a curious irony, it has also saved Flash from a further beating from the Eolas patent mess.

A few major successes have been brought to us by Flash in recent times. Yahoo has finally done the obvious and released a Flash mapping interface and YouTube’s video relies totally upon Flash’s video capabilities, of course.

Indeed, it’s the video stuff that ensures Adobe’s trusty plug-in is still relevant today, since the tech corporate’s vision of an all-purpose application delivery medium still looks years away, with a muted response to Flex and Microsoft’s competing Avalon (now imaginatively retitled WPF) technology tied to the long-delayed Vista.

“It’s a bit chaotic. There’s lots of noise, lots of activity. That’s great; there’s a huge amount of innovation” said Adobe’s Kevin Lynch [1] when asked about the future of Flash. Not a straight (or strong) answer.

In times past, Macromedia always managed to brave the storms, so perhaps Adobe can keep the tide in its favour.

I stumbled across Microsoft Expression this afternoon, quite by chance, really. Expression is a three-product graphics suite for designers. It borrows enormously from Macromedia Studio and a bit of Adobe Photoshop.

It seems to me to be quite a bald response to Macromedia’s buyout, but as usual Microsoft has an angle.

That angle is XAML, the UI language based on the XML standard that Microsoft will ship with Avalon.

XAML, which from what I’ve seen bears comparison to XML-based code for Macromedia Flex applications, is the output format from Expression’s Interactive Designer, the more unusual package in the suite.

Also on offer are Graphic Designer and Web Designer, sold to us via the kind of (literally) kaleidoscopic visuals that presumably appeal to funky design types.

Sample downloads weigh in at upto a rather hefty 140Mb.

Can’t wait to hear the price!

It remains to be seen whether Macromedia’s traditionally rather tasty approach to layouts will carry over into the somewhat more monolithic Black, Red and White id at Adobe.

Macromedia’s design aesthetic was different, occasionally pioneering, and always a strong influence on other projects. You didn’t see a lot of curved corners before the 2004 edition!

As my salute to the brand that showed us that corporate websites could be sexy, let’s look back at a few screenshots of the Macromedia site through the years: