Le Roi est mort. Can software that was never the market leader be considered “the king”? Perhaps only in our hearts. GoLive had long been our personal favorite, when it came to HTML development, and we were deeply saddened when Adobe dropped it from the Creative Suite. We got a tad bit excited when Adobe released version 9 last summer. But the pleasure was short-lived. Today, Adobe has dropped GoLive development and distribution.
The news isn’t entirely shocking. We estimate (based on highly technical statistical analysis called “guessing”) that approximately 9 people on the planet upgraded to GL9. Virtually everyone else saw the writing on the wall a year ago and started learning Dreamweaver. But if you haven’t made that swtich yet, not that there are some good resources available for moving from GL to DW, including a migration kit written by our friends at Adobe Lynn Grillo and Adam Pratt. Lynda.com also has a title on the subject by Garrick Chow (remember you can get a week’s free subscription at lynda.com/IDsecrets).
If you live in the states and you’re trying to get up to speed with DW, you might also be interested in a new series of seminars produced in May and June by MOGO Media and presented by the wonderful Brian Wood. You can find out more about that at mogoseminars.com.
By the way, we’re told that Adobe is also offering a $199 cross-grade offer to buy Dreamweaver if you currently own GoLive. (We can’t find a reference to that anywhere; perhaps it’s being sent as email to registered owners?) We don’t think there are any deals for upgrading from GoLive to the full Creative Suite, which is a shame.
What does any of this have to do with InDesign? Well, GoLive was becoming an HTML tool for InDesign users. That is, it was growing paragraph and character styles, dialog boxes and panels that look like InDesign, and other features that a designer/ID user would love. Dreamweaver, on the other hand, continues to be more of a developer’s tool than a designer’s tool in our opinion.
But there is also a bright light on the horizon: It turns out that the current Dreamweaver product manager is none other than Devin Fernandez…. Yes, the same Devin who was product manager for GoLive for many years! Devin understands both sides of the argument: the developers who want dreamweaver to be a hard-core experience, and the designers who are “code averse.” So while we don’t yet know anything about Dreamweaver CS4, we can only assume that he has our best interests at heart.
This article was last modified on December 18, 2021
This article was first published on April 28, 2008
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