Hands-On Review--Adobe GoLive 6.0 for Mac OS X

GoLive 6.0 is Adobe's just-released carbonized version of its popular professional WYSIWYG web site authoring and management application. It has been the main competitor of Macromedia's Dreamweaver among web-authoring professionals. With the release of GoLive 6.0, Adobe has beaten Macromedia to OS X. So, true to our previous statements a week ago last Friday, when GoLive 6.0 first appeared, we picked up a copy of the upgrade version to get out of having to constantly use OS X's Classic mode. The upgrade version for $99.95 at the Tysons Corner, VA, Apple Store works with GoLive 4 and 5.

As background for the review, GoLive has been our web authoring tool since it was called CyberStudio 3.x and sold by a company called GoLive, a company that Adobe subsequently purchased. Before that we wrote HTML code in a word processor. We have been using GoLive 4.0.1 since we did not see any significant benefit to us in upgrading GoLive 5 for managing a single web site. So our comparisons will be with the features of 4.0.1, not 5.x. We are not power users of GoLive so we don't use all of its features, even in v4.0.1. GoLive 4.0.1 runs fine in Classic mode but it is extremely slow to launch, to open files and to save.

GoLive 6.0 comes with several new features along with being carbonized for OS X. The web workgroup server and authoring for wireless devices are the major new capabilities touted by Adobe along with seamless integration with QuickTime 5. The Adobe press release states:

"The Workgroup server included in GoLive 6.0 enables teams to collaborate on projects and effectively manage Web and cross-media assets. New Dynamic Content authoring capabilities and native support for ASP, JSP and PHP lets designers easily configure a Web site to support data-driven transactions for e-commerce."

These tools are beyond the sophistication currently used for our web site. Still, its nice to know that they are available for future use. There are many other features as well. For example, v4.0.1 has only six simple floating windows while v6.0 has ten that are more complex.

The minimum system requirements for GoLive 6 are a Mac running OS 9.1+ or 10.1+, 96 MB RAM (128 MB recommended) and 90 MB disk space. The Web Workgroup Server only works with Mac OS 10.1+ and needs 150 MB of hard disk space. We recommend much more RAM for OS X, at least 256 MB. Our PowerBook G4 has 512 MB and it almost runs out of free memory with Internet Explorer, Entourage and PhotoDeluxe open at the same time as GoLive but not Classic mode.