Product Reviews

GoLive CS is the latest version of Adobe's Web publishing tool, and this upgrade brings to the application many much-needed updates and refinements. The most immediate of these is the interface, which has had a partial overhaul. The Object palette now resembles the Tools palette from other Adobe applications, although die-hards can make it revert to the old shape via a single click. The tools displayed within can be configured depending on the type of document you're working on, thereby ensuring superfluous items aren't seen.

Some thought has gone into speeding up workflow of common tasks: Open Recent groups previously opened documents into sites, HTML documents and CSS files, with keyboard shortcuts to the first in each list - a useful time-saver - and all keyboard shortcuts can now be defined through a straightforward interface.

Elsewhere, GoLive's flexible workspace is still evident, including the ability to group palettes or stash them as drawers. Furthermore, the main palette group contains three collapsible regions, and works in a similar way to the panels within Studio MX. The overall effect is pretty good, although the effectiveness of the interface is eroded somewhat because it still feels too cluttered, and is sometimes less than intuitive. Another black mark against GoLive is the tiny fonts used for many interface elements.

First and foremost, GoLive is aimed at visual designers, so it's no surprise that many of the new features are aimed at them. The ability to zoom Web layouts may initially seem superfluous - after all, at 72dpi, pixel-perfect precision isn't tricky to achieve-but being able to zoom out is an excellent innovation, enabling you to see how an entire page's layout works as a whole.

Time to get smart

However, the best design-oriented innovation is the enhanced Smart Objects feature, which has really come of age. Dropping a native Photoshop or Illustrator file on to a Web page brings up the 'Save for Web - Powered by ImageReady' dialog, familiar to anyone who's used Photoshop's Save for Web feature. Once settings have been defined and the image saved, the result appears in your layout. From here you can scale, crop or recompress the image, all without re-exporting, because resampling is done from the original native file. Additionally,

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if the original is edited, GoLive updates the embedded image accordingly. This means visual designers can work directly with their layouts rather than doing these vital tasks prior to putting together a Web page.

The speed at which GoLive deals with these things is remarkable, and is illustrative of the application's performance as a whole: during our tests, GoLive didn't crash once, and the interface and tools all performed admirably, even on a relatively old Power Mac G4.

Coders haven't been ignored with this update though, as evidenced by the new code completion engine, which provides a context-sensitive list of potential entries based on what you're typing. This feature works with a range of languages, including XHTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. Importantly, support for CSS has been massively enhanced: the CSS palette enables you to easily add styles to inline or block elements, and defining said styles is relatively straightforward via the powerful CSS Editor, hindered only slightly by its somewhat clunky interface. Unfortunately, questions still remain regarding GoLive's ability to make totally standards-compliant Web sites - even new XHTML documents contain a deprecated attribute - but such problems are fewer than in previous versions, and are usually restricted to features specific to GoLive. Besides, the exhaustive built-in Syntax Checker usually weeds out offending code.

Those working both visually and with code will appreciate the new Show Split Source view, which works as expected, although while items selected in Layout view are highlighted in the code area, the reverse isn't true. Oddly, this view is accessed via the document's Status Bar, rather than via the top of the document window. This is a little disorientating, and we'd prefer all view options to be grouped. Also, these views could do with refinement. There are two visual views: Layout and Preview - you work in the former and the latter shows a more accurate rendering of the page. We'd prefer to see a more accurate Layout view, and for Preview to be removed entirely, along with the increasingly superfluous Outline Editor.

Crack the code

Despite such niggles, we were impressed with this update, but GoLive has its work cut out these days to appeal to the Mac faithful. Arguably, Freeway is more suited to visual designers, and Dreamweaver to hand-coders. But for those in the middle ground - visual designers who occasionally want to tinker with code - GoLive may now be the best choice. The improvements to code-oriented tools and Smart Objects mean hand coders and designers using other Adobe tools may also be tempted. We'd like to see improved standards compliance and further refinements to the interface, but by and large we're glad to see that GoLive can once again be considered a competitor rather than an also-ran in the race for best Web design application.