Dreamweaver has three floating interface elements that you're likely to leave open most of the time: the Launcher, the Object palette, and the Property inspector.

The Launcher
Use the Launcher to open and close Dreamweaver's palettes and inspectors with a single click. The icons from the Launcher are repeated (without labels) at the bottom of the Document window in the Mini-Launcher. Click an icon in either place and notice that the icon is highlighted in both the Launcher and the Mini-Launcher. Once you learn the Launcher icons, you can close this window and rely on the Mini-Launcher. This will free up screen space.

The Object palette
The Object palette duplicates the functionality of the Insert menu, letting you insert page elements with a click of the mouse. Click any object's icon or drag the icon into the Document window to create the specified object.

If you don't recognize the icons in the palette, let the pointer rest on each one to see a tooltip. You can also set a preference to display text labels along with the Object palette icons. (Choose Edit > Preferences, and then choose General from the category list. Change the Object Palette option to Icons and Text.)

The elements in the palette are grouped into six panels: Characters, Common, Forms, Frames, Head, and Invisibles. Use the pop-up menu at the top of the Object palette to switch between panels.

When you click an element in the Object palette, a dialog box may appear to request the source file, dimensions, codebase, or other attributes for the element. If you would rather never be presented with this dialog box, choose Edit > Preferences, and then choose General from the category list; then deselect the Show Dialog when Inserting Objects option. To instead bypass the dialog box on a case-by-case basis, hold down the Control (Windows) or Option (Macintosh) key while you click an object. Dreamweaver inserts a placeholder for the object or inserts the object using default values.

The Property inspector
The Property inspector displays the properties of the currently selected HTML element. These properties correspond to the attributes of the HTML tag or tags associated with the element. For example, when an image is selected, the Property inspector displays the width ( W ), height ( H ), source ( Src ), alternate text ( Alt ), and other information about the image. When text is selected, the Property inspector displays the paragraph format, font, size, and other information about the text.

To see how the Property inspector changes for each element, try inserting several HTML elements by Control-clicking (Windows) or Option-clicking (Macintosh) various buttons in the Object palette. Select each element in the Document window, and then fill in different values for the properties and watch what happens.

Try this exercise to see what the Property inspector does when you adjust the width and height of an image:

1	Click the Insert Image button on the Object palette.
2	In the dialog box that appears, browse to a GIF or JPEG file.
3	Click Select (Windows) or Choose (Macintosh). If a dialog box appears with a message about relative paths, click OK.
4	In the Property inspector, type in new values for width ( W ) and height ( H ).
	Notice that the numbers you entered have become bold. This indicates that the width and height you entered are not the actual width and height of the image. Images look better, and generally take much less time to download, if you resize them in an image editor (such as Macromedia Fireworks), rather than specifying a width and height in the HTML file for the browser to use in resizing the image. However, you might want to temporarily resize the image in the Property inspector to see how a different image size would affect your layout. To return the values to their original settings, click the W and H text labels.