Comment by chrisfinazzo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisfinazzo | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't the first time Adobe has taken a decent app w/ potential and run it into the ground:

Dreamweaver did many things, not all of them well, but it was never actively terrible. Over time, its functionality got split out into more apps that didn't actually require people to write web code - a disappointment that shouldn't surprise as Adobe's heart was still w/ print production and never really committed to the development side of things.

I would have expected that after Flash went EOL that more resources would go to the editor, but they just mined it out before going subscription, a dealbreaker that made me seek out Panic's Coda and (later) BBEdit.

I know it still exists in Creative Cloud, but unless you are deep in the Adobe ecosystem, there are better options available.

Fireworks actually had a lot of features people gushed about Sketch and Figma having close to a decade before they existed.

Adobe never understood this and tried to push web design into PS and AI then killed FW.

> and AI then killed FW.

I did a double take here before remembering that AI is also the acronym for Adobe Illustrator. I'd totally forgotten about AI!

I want to believe in Dreamweaver but when I try it "just doesn't work" or it does work with a 5 second delay for the screen to update when I type. Webstorm doesn't promise as much but at least I can get stuff done with it.

Adobe just didn't manage the pivot to web design very well. Dreamweaver had been run into the ground. So was Fireworks. And look at where Flash is.

> Adobe just didn't manage the pivot to web design very well.

I'd argue they didn't manage it at all. Almost all of the web focused apps that people think of were acquired as opposed to being developed in-house. Adobe (correctly) recognized that the web was becoming more important and they could play in that space, but the mindset for what these apps were designed to address missed the mark.

A web-focused IDE as opposed to a designer's tool that writes things for you are vastly different in terms of what these apps do and how they work.

Oh so true. Adobe also had a product that is the same concept as Webflow, called InFlow (if I am not mistaken), and killed it, before Webflow existed. Some of its employe went to work for Webflow.

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