Product Reviews

As soon as Adobe bought Macromedia, the writing was on the wall for GoLive. Although it has many supporters willing to argue its superiority over Dreamweaver, Macromedia's web design tool has been an industry standard almost since the industry started, so it was inevitable that Adobe would push its own child out of the nest in favour of Dreamweaver.

GoLive is no longer part of the Creative Suite family, so the latest version is just a humble version 9 standalone product instead of GoLive CS3. To some extent, that's surprising, as GoLive is now intended for designers who want to design for the web and integrates with CS3 better than Dreamweaver CS3 does.

For starters, unlike Dreamweaver, GoLive has had a makeover to give it the same interface as CS3. As well as a minor menu rearrangement that includes the now-standard ability to collapse palettes down to simple square icons (something available in the original GoLive CyberStudio, but long since missing in action); the toolbar at the top has been replaced by an InDesign-style control panel; the main site window has been redesigned away from multiple tabs in favour of an Adobe Bridge-style layout; and an improved Tools palette with a range of visual design tools now runs down the left.

There's also the colour management functions it shares with CS3, and the ability to copy or drag content between InDesign and GoLive, preserving the formatting or applied styles and having them automatically translate into CSS styles. It also boasts an InDesign-style Place command that lets you import images and other content into your web page, converting the images into GoLive-style Smart Objects. New preferences enable you to automatically import the original images into the site's collection of files.

The message is clear: if you know how to design layouts in InDesign and want to design for the web, this application is for you.

Certainly, there are few new features for hardcore web designers: no Spry libraries for Ajax

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development, no dynamic site tools, and no support for Web 2.0 necessities such as podcasting or blogging. Indeed, as with every release of GoLive from Adobe, while you're looking at the 'new features' list, you have to keep one eye on the 'old features' list to see what you'll be losing with the upgrade. This time, as well as the templates for new sites, support for TypePad and MovableType template tags have disappeared, no doubt because of poor demand and the lacklustre support in CS2. It's a somewhat ironic move, given that GoLive 9 now does a better job of preserving custom MovableType tags from the once inevitable rewrites GoLive CS2 used to perpetrate.

Instead, much of the emphasis is on tools for creating layouts visually. The Tools palette now has tools for selecting and working with table content, something that was always a challenge in CS2. Further, joining the Tools palette is a Container tool, which is basically a visual way of embedding <div> tags inline. A Style Pipette tool lets you copy styles from one object to another, while the standard Adobe Direct Selection tool - renamed the Deep Selection tool for GoLive - provides a menu of possible selections, including layers, sub-layers and text, for anything on which you happen to click.

Pull-downs from the control panel offer easier access to CSS-based layout functions such as margins, float and padding, although they don't offer any new functions. InDesign-esque stylesheet palettes give designers the chance to create paragraph and character styles based on CSS formatting that they can then apply to text.

Like the other 'new' features in GoLive, these are really just more usable interfaces for existing features, but they do make life easier for almost everyone who doesn't exclusively hand-code. The fact that everything remains editable afterwards means the usual fears of Wysiwyg - code bloat, non-standard mark-up et al - are no great concern here, and GoLive 9 produces pretty lean code anyway.

Despite GoLive's superior ease of use over Dreamweaver, and with Adobe already suggesting to potential GoLive purchasers that they might want to think about buying Dreamweaver instead, it's difficult to recommend this new version of GoLive to anyone, particularly at £400 inc VAT for a new licence. Existing GoLive owners can upgrade for a more palatable £170 or so, which is probably still a little too expensive for a new interface and a Universal Binary speed boost. However, for established GoLive fans, it'll be worth it, even if it's probably the last version they'll ever see.