Review: @ssembly line 1.0

A web designer suite

Company: bizdesign

Price: $99

Pros: Excellent browser-implemented catalog and tables of contents. Gazillions of templates, patterns and buttons. More immediate professional-looking results than very low end web builders. Can add buttons patterns and photos to expand its artistic scope. Useful third-party web creation software included.

Cons: Many patterns, motifs and background tiles give a similar look though differently colored and patterned. Only 4 ready-made styles. Manual could be more helpful. Many of the software applications are demo versions and a couple are slightly outdated.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5

July 2, 1998

Assembly Line is a dual Mac/Windows CD chock full of web design tools. In fact, there is zero space left on the CD. I haven't counted them but bizdesign claims that there are exactly:

• 3032 pre-designed HTML templates
• 3032 buttons
• 2274 backgrounds and textures
• 758 banners
• 3032 sidebars
• 1516 dividers
• 758 button bars

In addition, there are 17 web site production-related applications that are in Mac format. They are:

• Netscape Communicator 4.04
• Microsoft Internet explorer 4.0
• WebPainter SE 2.0
• NetObjects Fusion 3.0
• GoLive Cyberstudio 2.02
• ObjectDANCER 1.5
• GifDANCER 1.0
• Media Cleaner Pro 2.01
• RealPlayer Pro Promo
• Anarchie 2.01
• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• QuickTime 2.5
• Macromedia Shockwave Director 6.0
• iChat
• Beatnik 1.1.6
• Voxware Toolvox 2.0
• Vivo VivoActive 2.0

Documentation

The manual is a Microsoft Internet Explorer HTML document that loads MSIE when clicked. Netscape can also open the manual by selecting the file from within Netscape. The manual is very "thin", mostly listing what is on the CD and illustrating how it is hierarchically arranged. It is not difficult to figure out how to use Assembly Line I had no problems but a simple step-by-step instruction set would be very helpful in quickly grasping the most effective ways to use the catalog and the content files and to create web designs. The third-party software description file is very good.

Use

Setting up was simple. I just inserted the CD and opened the catalog file in Microsoft Internet Explorer by clicking on the catalog file. If your preference in browsers is Netscape, the browser will have to be launched first and then the catalog file opened from within Netscape rather than just clicking on the file. This may be remedied by copying the Assembly Line folders to the hard drive and then opening and saving the catalog file as a Netscape file on the hard drive. Doing this will take up a lot of space but the collection may be pruned to one's taste to save space and new artwork added to the appropriate folders.

I had a lot of fun assembling various web page designs using the browser-implemented catalog and tables of contents. Selecting them and changing the look by selecting others was very simple and quick for the limited time I spent working with Assembly Line.

Conclusions

bizdesign advertises that Assembly Line is a "Mass Production" set of tools for web design, i.e. in bizdesign's words "The most creative way to rapidly assemble high quality Internet websites and multimedia projects...." I think that is an apt description. The excellent browser-implemented catalog and and tables of contents complete with large "thumbnails" allows one to pick and choose among the many artwork offerings in assembly line fashion while constructing a web page. While there seems to be an endless combination of pieces, the actual "look and feel" achieved is still restricted in scope and as such it is likely to be judged limiting by the truly creative souls amongst us. For the rest of us, Assembly Line provides tools an substance to build a more professional-looking web site than other very simple web building tools. And, of course, the provided patterns, colors, templates, buttons and photographs can be augmented by one's own artwork added to the folders and easily used with the Assembly Line catalog if copied to a hard drive.

Most of the software applications provided are freely available elsewhere, most of them are demo versions and some of them are not the most recent version. Still it's a pretty handy collection of relevant applications from audio, chat, video, image processing, web browsing and ftp clients and more.

Assembly Line is not Macromedia Dreamweaver nor GoLive Cyberstudio nor even Adobe Pagemill which was used to create much of the content. It is not a web authoring tool and it is not claimed to be one. However, in handling multimedia and graphical content it adds to the capabilities of Pagemill and even Dreamweaver and Cyberstudio because of Assembly Line's extensive and easily usable graphical content.

Copyright © 1998 by Bill Fox.
All rights reserved--no commercial use permitted without attribution.

Of course . . . . . . and I am proud to be an Evangelista! . . .