For that reason alone, GoLive deserves to be considered.As a long-time GoLive user (we’ve developed dozens of successful commercial sites with it), this is depressing but not surprising news.ĭepressing, because I can’t imagine trying to maintain and modify some of the sites our studio is responsible for without GoLive-only features like the site window, In/Out links palette, smart objects with variables, save for web, and more.Īdobe bought GoLive from a third-party developer when it was the premiere web authoring program for the Mac, before Dreamweaver was even a speck in its daddy’s eye. Nonetheless, if you are involved in any form of database or e-commerce design, particularly if you have used previous versions of GoLive, this release is the most sophisticated editor for producing ASP pages. Streaming media support is better than any equivalent software, with what amounts to a built-in audio-video suite from which you can edit QuickTime and Flash files.įor quick and dirty Web design, GoLive is not (and does not intend to be) the answer, and we still prefer Dreamweaver in terms of workflow. The History palette enables multiple undos. Image tracing speeds up page design by allowing you to trace over a template (this has been available to Dreamweaver users for some time).
Other new features are less substantial, but still helpful to designers. Increasingly, this is what Web design is all about, with static pages incapable of meeting the demands made by e-commerce and rapidly changing media such as online news. This enables information to be searched and served dynamically, depending on the calls made by the browser. Put simply, GoLive's Dynamic Link features enable Web designers to connect to a database by designing a page with relevant fields which are then bound to a database. What is less common in editors of this class is support for Microsoft's ASP (Active Server Pages) through its Dynamic Link palette.įuture versions will offer support for JSP (Java Server Pages), but Adobe has seen the current demand for ASP and rightly decided to fill the gap, placing GoLive in direct competition with Macromedia's Dreamweaver UltraDev. Dragging and dropping smart components - such as expanding menu bars or pop-up layers - generates the appropriate script behind the scenes, without designers needing to get their hands dirty writing code.
There is excellent support for DHTML and other elements of dynamic design, like cascading style sheets. In addition, GoLive 5.0 includes an enhanced link and site manager, while the page layout can now be controlled down to the pixel level. The most important change from the previous version, and the one deservedly flagged by Adobe, is support for dynamic database design. Simple tasks, such as changing the background colour of a page, were infuriating with previous versions, but this is much less of a problem with GoLive 5.0. Once you know which palette to use, the Properties Inspector changes to match your selected object. There is a logical workflow to the program - most objects and components are simply dragged and dropped into place - but this logic has to be learned.
Alongside this are two smaller default windows: a Tools palette, from which components can be dragged onto the screen and a Properties Inspector, from which a component's attributes can be changed.
Each document is broken down into a series of tabbed windows covering layout, frames, source code, outline and a final preview screen.