Five questions with Greg Rewis

GREG REWIS is the group manager, Creative Solutions Evangelism at Adobe Systems. With over 20 years of computer industry experience, Greg spends in excess of 200 days a year on the road talking with customers, giving product demonstrations at trade shows and seminars, and speaking at industry conferences…

WD: To start, what is the main philosophy behind CS4 and Web Premium in terms of product integration and designer workflow?

GR: The main philosophy behind CS4 Web Premium has to be the focus on providing web designers every tool necessary to build modern, standards-compliant websites and rich, interactive web experiences.

WD: When speaking to designers when you’re out on the road, what are the key benefits they attribute with using CS4? What do they care most for within the upgrade?

GR: I think that depends upon their speciality. While there are certainly those designers that “do it all”, I tend to see audiences that are divided into HTML specialists or interactive Flash specialists. For each of these, there are huge benefits with CS4. On the HTML side of things, the new Live View and Live Code features of Dreamweaver generally leave web designers speechless, because they are so used to having to go to the browsers, aided by several plug-ins in order to get that functionality. To be able to truly see and also interact with the page as it appears in the browser without leaving your authoring environment is spectacular. On the Flash front, the simplified animation model is a definite crowd-pleaser, making it so much easier and faster to do animations. At the same time, however, the more experienced users love the control they get with the new Motion Editor. But by far, the two features that stand out the most are the 3D and Inverse Kinetics features.

WD: What requests do you get for new features that may be incorporated into the next release?

GR: That’s the problem with building software – just when you think you’ve built the perfect application, someone finds a shortcoming, or a technology evolves and you’re back to the drawing board. On the web front we are obviously watching the continued growth and popularity of the various AJAX frameworks, as well as the explosion of dynamic content systems such as blogs. For Flash, it’s all about continuing to make things easier for new users, while exposing even more creative possibilities to our advanced users.

WD: Where does Dreamweaver specifically sit within the modern web design toolset and has its role changed as other solutions have evolved?

GR: Dreamweaver continues to be the dominant visual web-authoring tool, and I think it has managed to “keep up with the times” quite nicely. As someone who has been around HTML editors for a very long time, I’ve had the luxury of watching the industry grow up. And as I always point out in my presentations, I’ve seen every version of Dreamweaver, and this release is by far the biggest in terms of real productivity gains for web professionals. In fact, I have the most fun when I get to show it off to the hardcore web standards’ crowd. These are the folks that don’t believe there’s anything “in there for them”. Once they see the Live Preview and Live Code features, however, they start smiling. They generally admit that “Dreamweaver has definitely come a long way”.

WD: For the future, where should Adobe be moving with CS tools to follow mobile trends or counter webbased publishing solutions?

GR: As any software company must, we are constantly watching trends within the industry. And as the mobile world matures, we are obviously very cognizant of the need for our tools to play a role in content creation for this platform. You’re seeing evidence of this not only in our own tools, which every release includes additional mobile-related features, but also in our commitment to the Open Screen Project to ensure that every internetconnected device can view rich, interactive content and experiences created by our customers. Simultaneously, you see us expanding our own web-based solutions. Acrobat.com is a prime example of this – and one I use daily. And as a web professional myself, I’m really excited by our BrowserLab service that we have recently released on Adobe Labs. There will always be a need for desktop software, but we realise there is also a lot to be said for these cloud-based services and applications