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Tom Muck's Blog: Bad Dreamweaver bug for Mac usersTom Muck's Blog

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Bad Dreamweaver bug for Mac users

Monday, May 09, 2005 2:30:02 PM

There is a bad bug in Dreamweaver on the Macintosh platform that affects all extension developers. There is a limit to how many menus and submenus that can be created -- a limit of 26 items. This might not seem like a huge limitation, but considering that the Server Behaviors menu already has 13 menus, that leaves only 13 more for extension developers to use. This limit can be reached quickly by only a few extensions and/or extension developers. Let's say company A releases 4 extension suites under their own menu:

Company A
  > Suite 1
  > Suite 2
  > Suite 3
  > Suite 4

They have just added 5 menus to the system, bringing the total to 18. Now Company B releases 4 extension suites. In 2 of their suites, they have submenus:

Company B
  > Suite 1
  > Suite 2
  > Suite 3
    > Option 1
    > Option 2
  > Suite 4
    > Option 1
    > Option 2

Now there are 27 menus - 1 over the limit. Now, every extension that is installed after these will not show up, or show as blank entries in the menu. Let's say Jack's Extension Company releases one extension suite:

Jack's Extension Company
  > Suite 1

Jack's extension will not show up and will not be usable by the Dreamweaver user, not because his extension did anything wrong, but because of the bug in Dreamweaver. Company A and Company B are not at fault here, but the end result is that their extensions are seen by the user because they show up alphabetically before Jack's Extension Company.

This is a bug that Macromedia is aware of (reported by Interakt on their site as well) but have still to this day done nothing about it. At the very least there should be a hot fix for this problem from Macromedia. AT THE VERY LEAST. There is nothing that can be done from the extension developer's point of view, outside of doing away with menus and simply listing all extensions under the main menus. This is not a good option, because the menu will soon become very long.

Macromedia, please fix this. Don't wait until the next version comes out. This is a huge problem for Mac users.

Category tags: Macromedia/Adobe, Dreamweaver

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