I have used dreamweaver for years on my Windows machine, but for many reasons will have to go abroad for a while. Ok, here is the problem, a new license for Dreamweaver is 400 USD, round numbers… (+tax of course)
Any idea of what other program in the Mac family can do what dreamweaver does so capably?
If there is no choice, well I will byte the bullet and get the program
First of all, check if Adobe is offering a cross-grade option, and let you buy the new license for DreamWeaver at a reduced price.
Another great web editor (that I prefer over DW) is GoLive, still from Adobe. I’m not sure there is a future for this app, however, after the purchase of DW from Adobe. A free, but not very good, option is VNU.
Less flexible, but in my view a very interesting option, is RapidWeaver. In a similar way, you could try SandVox and iWeb (but RapidWeaver, in particular with the many third party additions, allows for more customization over the two others).
Paolo
The closest to DW would probably be Freeway (there’s a Pro and an Express version):
softpress.com/products/index.php
I use Sandvox (version Pro, that also allows raw html) and I love it. I much rather prefer it to Shutterbug (that I also own, but don’t use it) or RapidWeaver (that I tried, but never liked).
– MJ
I used to use Freeway Pro, and it worked nicely for most things. I switched to Dreamweaver when Adobe included it in the CS2 package. I do a lot of work in Photoshop, so the added ease of moving between the two keeps me in DW now. It would be hard to move back to Freeway.
If you want a Freeway Pro set, I’ll sell mine cheaply. But, really, you’ll likely miss DW.
what I’ve heard is that they will allow you to switch platforms for the price of the upgrade, as long as you destroy one or the other.
So if that is the case I will have to byte the bullet
What’s Coda like? (Yeah, they’re the guys who swiped the Best User Experience Award, grrr… But I can see why. 
) That looks pretty lovely. I’m downloading now, in fact - I’ve never tried it before. But I love the idea of typing HTML in one pane and seeing the page grow in the other, without having to keep swapping between a text editor and a web browser. Almost as though, in the same way I was fed up with switching between documents and apps for writing, they got fed up with switching about just to create a web page.
EDIT: After downloading and trying it for a couple of minutes, my initial impressions are that Coda is pretty bloody brilliant. It does indeed act a bit like a Scrivener for web building. Nice!
Best,
Keith
Coda is fantastic. Everything you’d expect from a Panic app
The only downside, which won’t affect many users anyway, is that it can’t locally render PHP without using OSX’s built-in server software, which is a bit complicated for the average user. That said, most average users won’t even use PHP, so it’s hardly a big downside. It does prevent me from using it full time, though.
A bit late but I’ll stick in my two cents worth…
I’ve used Dreamweaver (on a PC) for years. Still do for my job (web developer). If I had to spend my own money, I’d still get it. It’s far & away the best app for WYSIWYG type stuff (cutting code is a whole different kettle of fish, er, html though, although DW is OK for that, using the Allaire Homesite thing for coding).
I bought RapidWeaver as part of a MacHeist package and think it’s a WOFTAM. I just can’t see the attraction. Coda does absolutely nothing for me either, I’m afraid. Tried it, discounted it.
Currently, on the mac at home I use TextMate (not WYSIWYG, but it does me).
If you can’t get DW, then you could consider NVu. It’s a multiplatform app and it’s free.
I’ve read that development has stopped on Nvu and it’s been replaced as a free open source web editor (“Nvu’s unofficial bug-fix release”) by Kompozer. Haven’t tried it myself.
From the FAQ:
Why call it «KompoZer» instead of «Nvu»?
Because « Nvu and the Nvu logo are trademarks of Linspire Inc. »
As Linspire stopped the development of Nvu, there is no legal way to correct any bug in Nvu.
I can only recommend RapidWeaver. I use it for a number of sites, including my own, which has now over 150 pages. So RW is definitively capable of handling large sites.
The 3rd-party-plugins are great and a must-have.
And what do you people think about Apple’s iWeb? Would it be worth it to purchase it?
I have only tried iWeb 1, which was crap. It generated bloatet code, which led to very long loading times for the generated pages.
I don’t however know anything about iWeb 2.
I have tried Sandvox and RW and have sticked with RW.
Coda is outstanding - I use it exclusively for my web-dev and online help day job. However, I’m guessing our OP is looking for a WYSIWYG design tool since he’s been using Dreamweaver. Actually, Dreamweaver’s code view is fantastic (it is built on what used to be Homesite…the html coding app upon which all good html coding apps, Coda included, owe homage to), but few people ever see or use it, since DW caters to the visual crowd.
The previous suggestions - RapidWeaver and NVU - would be my recommendation if you’re looking for a DW replacement. I’ve heard Sandbox is pretty good, too. iWeb is really too limited, although what it does do, it does well.
Having used Coda solidly for 6 months, I can say it’s missing a few ‘Dreamweaver killer’ features, even though it’s a tool built after my own heart (i.e. build websites semantically in code, and have a rapid view mode to check my progress easily). First and foremost is the lack of a ‘global find and replace’ feature like DW’s project replace - Coda’s find and replace is nice, and the highlighting simple and intuitive, but you can only do it in one file at a time. Not so nice when you have a site of 350+ help pages and you want to replace the word ‘Widget’ with ‘Fancy new marketing fandangle’.
It’s also missing code-completion support for any CSS3 properties - yes, they aren’t standard yet but many of them have browser support (even in IE7 - shock!) - so autocomplete my opacity: 70; setting already!
Aside from that, Coda fulfils my dreams on a daily basis. I adore that I can WebDAV into my Plone site, edit a few DTML files directly on the server in one window (and have them correctly read as CSS), and have the other window showing a live preview of the site, with the visual DOM inspector enabled, updating as I change the code.
I switched from Dreamweaver on PC to Coda too.
I like it and didn’t find any better program, at least not for that price. But it is less from perfect.
It is not surprising that you can not use the Dreamweaver template markups (unless you copy them manually) and some other things you get used to when working with DW are missing too:
You got a split view with code in one and preview in the other window if you like. But if you move in the code window the preview won’t move along as it would in Dreamweaver (but this has always been slow and jolting). The other way doesn’t work at all – you can not, like, mark some text in the preview and automatically see the underlying code of this specific text in the code window. These are two independent views of one page. (This includes that you can not type in text in the preview window to find it properly encoded in the code window – a preview is a preview.)
And I missed the “upload related files” feature. And worst is in my opinion that moving a file inside of the site does not reset it’s relative paths to it’s new location.
But on the other hand, Dreamweaver, latest version, is not great at all. I tested it for a while, and even if I had the money (I could have bought a teacher’s edition but even then) I would not have spended it. For me it got worse since MX with every version.
But back to Coda: If the free editor Smultron only had a structured project view like Coda I would have gone for it and an FTP program (I already own the great CSSEdit). But in Smultron you only can display a file either with it’s name or it’s complete path – one leaves you without any hint were the file belongs to, the other does not leave you any space for the code window.
Maybe I would have gone for TextMate, who’s folding feature I like very much (it is rumoured Coda will get this too!).
But I was neither happy with any of the FTP programs I tested nor did I like the idea of having to use a bunch of programs just to make minor changes to a web page.
So Coda’s all-in-one solution got to me. It’s really comfortable that with a single click you can publish any file that has been changed. That has been changed from within Coda or that has been opened from within Coda’s “binder” (or what this is called outside Scrivenerland – brrr, who wants to know how it is like outside Scrivenerland?) to a third applications, to be precise. Coda just protocols the changes and there you go.
I have to explain the word “publish” to everyone who is not a Coda user: Coda knows both, publish and upload.
The latter uploads to the root folder, publish means, the file gets uploaded to the same position in the site’s hierarchy it has offline.
Which leads right to maybe THE real downer of Coda: It offers download, of course, but no “un-publish” or whatever you might like to call the backwards equivalent of publish. Meaning: You want a file that’s online, you download it, it arrives in the offline root folder and then you have to move it if it doesn’t belong there. This is really annoying and can be a lot of work. Especially if you’re not the only person working on the site and your collaborators have been busy bees overnight.
By the way, I found this quite shocking when I tested the stand-alone FTP programs: A lot of them do not synchronize offline and online sites properly. The best results surprisingly came from the free FireFTP extension of Firefox.
Coda is, again, not perfect, but it is good and I have no doubt it will get much better. Just look at it’s site view, how the icons of the sites are generated of the site’s index page and how they are sticked with little stripes of scotch tapes to the background.
This reminded me a little bit of Scrivener’s corkboard view – not some eye candy to distract from lack in functionality but a clear indicator of love for even the tiniest of details.
and it will be able to talk to my copy on the windows machine.
Two things… video training included? WOW, I am a happy camper.
Thanks for all the sugestions but after downloading different programs I realized that yes, I am a DW junkie 
Now I can start the redesign of the Website and if need be take 'Puter with me with parents, and work on site from their home.
Mark me up for ‘one vote to coda too’. I have used dreamweaver on Mac and PC and in my opinion (I’m a hand-coder), Coda knocks spots off DW. DW has a lot of unnecessary features - think Word vs Scriv - and it’s vastly over priced for what it does.
I work around this by putting my projects in my ~/Sites folder and telling Coda to view it as the local testing server. Apache by default is already pointed at it (localhost/~username) so your php is rendered live. PHP is easy to set up, even for the average user if they can comfortably follow instructions. All they have to do is uncomment 1 line of the conf file and the procedure is very well documented.
As a freelance writer I tried using Rapidweaver for my site, which isn’t much more than an online brochure. I use CMS’s all the time for work, and I know some basic html and enough about css’s to tweak fonts and colours, but I’m no developer.
The GUI was good but I had too many complaints about the site not loading, videos not playing etc. I also found it too fiddly to replace template artwork, and the plug in they recommend to handle it was forever crashing. A shame, cos they’re a little outfit based in Brighton, I think, and it’s good to support small Brit developers.
I ended up redoing the whole thing in iWeb which is a lot simpler, and Just Works. I just wish there was a way of doing automatic menus and submenus, rather than having the sections across the top.
Along the way I tried Freeway but it seemed almost identical to Rapidweaver for my needs, but more expensive.
I use Freeway for the farm site and Wordpress for the blogs. Freeway won me over by using the same sort of approach to web pages as I was used to in Quark or InDesign - you “draw” a web page, using boxes. The triumph of the familiar.
One day I’ll get my head round css…
Pip pip!
Myself I use the Adobe CS3 Suite which includes DW, Flash, Fireworks, PS, AI,IND, Acrobat Professional.
Dreamweaver is the defacto standard is by far the best web developing software out there for many reasons. But truly depends on how “professional” an app you need. (Like the difference between Photoshop and other Image Editing software)
As far as GoLive. Well it went the way of the DoDo bird as did Adobe Image Ready (If you have Adobe Image ready from CS2 keep a copy!)
GoLive and Image Ready will no longer be developed since Adobe bought Macromedia. Fireworks and Dreamweaver are the replacements.
PS: call adobe and see about cross upgrading your DW.
I must say that I’ve been developing the web site of my theatre*, for years, with RapidWeaver, and it has worked great. It is not a complex site (just text and pictures), but with several pages and some php. With about 20,000 accessed a year, I would have been warned of serious troubles.
Page loading problems might depend by a “dirty” cache, and you can clean it with a dedicated command in RapidWeaver.
Paolo