Hands-On Review--Adobe GoLive 9.0 (Universal)
Adobe's concise description of GoLive 9.0 is:
"This intuitive new version empowers non-code savvy design professionals to create modern, CSS-compliant websites using a visual interface and design techniques familiar to anyone who knows Adobe InDesign CS3 software and print layout. Designers can easily incorporate assets from other Adobe products by copying and pasting formatted content from InDesign layouts and by embedding native Photoshop, Illustrator, and Adobe PDF files as smart objects. With GoLive 9, designers can master the basics of web design and then grow into building more sophisticated web experiences using the industry-leading tools in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 software."
GoLive has been our main tool for developing and maintaining Macs Only!'s Web pages since GoLive was the name of the company and CyberStudio was the name of the software. CyberStudio was the first WYSIWYG Web development tool to convince us to switch from manual HTML coding using BBEdit. Adobe subsequently bought GoLive and reissued CyberStudio as GoLive starting with version 4.0 as we recall.
GoLive (and as CyberStudio) has always been a bit buggy. Seven annoying bugs still remain in GoLive CS2 (8.0.1), the version that 9.0 replaces. They are:
- In some GoLive documents, but not all, the font and size chosen as default for that document (a) is not applied when text is copied from another document and pasted into the page and (b) when typed in following two carriage returns. Actually, these actions may be a feature that we haven't determined how to control.
- Occasionally, text copied from another non-GoLive document and pasted into a GoLive document and then subsequently partially deleted, appropriately disappears in the Layout mode. However, in Preview mode or when posted to the web, the deleted text reappears. When the GoLive document is viewed again in Layout mode, after previewing or posting the document, the deleted text is visible and must be deleted again. Frequent readers of Macs Only! may have noticed this orphaned extraneous text from time to time, usually at the end of articles.
- Occasionally, when editing text that was copied and pasted into a GoLive document from another non-GoLive document, hitting the return key results in GoLive unexpectedly quitting. Since we do a lot of this in producing Macs Only!, we have to save very frequently.
- GoLive document windows can be dragged and dropped with their top under the header tool bar, concealing the window's control buttons.
- The selected tab in the Inspector window changes to another tab from time to time on its own, a minor annoyance.
- In an ordered list, the font of the number shown in Layout mode is not the same font as the text.
- A huge number of orphaned <div> tags can collect in the source code through repeated cutting and pasting of text.
We're happy to see GoLive 9.0 being released, primarily because it is a Universal Application and it fulfills Adobe's promise to continue to develop the application despite choosing Dreamweaver CS3 as its primary Web development tool but also because we hope that the annoying bugs finally have been squashed.
Hands-On
We downloaded the 30-day trial version of GoLive 9.0 for this review and ran the "Updates..." selection under the Help menu. No updates were available, at least in trial mode. We are using the trial version of GoLive 9.0 because we plan to migrate to Dreamweaver CS3 and may not use GoLive any more--we'll see.
Launching GoLive 9.0 at 25, 7 and 5 seconds for three launches was much faster than GoLive CS2 (46, 22 and 19 sec.) at least partly because it is a Universal Application and runs native on our MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo. Furthermore, the launching of GoLive CS2 caused our MacBook Pro C2D's fans to rev up perceptibly while GoLive 9.0 did not--perhaps this is caused by Rosetta emulation needed to run GoLive CS2 on our MacBook Pro C2D.
GoLive 9.0 opened all of our Web pages created with GoLive CS2 (8.0.1). Unfortunately, some were opened with the top of their document window hidden under the header Control bar so that the window and GoLive controls there were not accessible, a bug. Fortunately, the Control bar can be closed in order to move the document window from being hidden.
The user interface of GoLive 9.0 has been given a make-over so that it looks and functions more similarly to the CS3 applications. Many of the menus have changed and we had to hunt a bit for selections that we commonly use. For example, the Paragraph, Font, Size and Style selections have been collected as a sub-menu under "HTML" in the Type menu. Gone from the window header of each document is the Preview mode tab that showed how the Web page rendered in the default (Opera) or selected Web browser. Preview mode is now a button on the Tool Panel--it shows the page with Adobe Live Rendering by default but Web browsers may be added in GoLive 9.0's preferences. We added Safari and Firefox.
An efficient feature of the new user interface is that the most salient parts of the former Inspector window are now in the double-height header Control bar. The drawback is that a small amount of vertical screen space is lost which could be a concern to some.
GoLive 9.0 has a dock that contains what Adobe calls a "Workspace." The dock is fixed to the far right side of the screen regardless of the screen's size. This is somewhat annoying with our 30" Cinema Display and the dock cannot be moved left to expose the right hand side of the desktop where we keep files that we need to access. The Inspector is now in the dock rather than being a floating window but, as we noted, its most salient features are now in the header Control bar. One can set up, save and manage different Workspaces and hide them altogether completely clearing the screen's right hand side.
Unfortunately, we have already discovered a few bugs in GoLive 9.0:
- Bugs #1a. and #1b. above still exist. The fix for #1a. is to type two periods and paste the text between them.
- Bug #4. above still exists.
- When using the text tool, the cursor does not always appear visually at the insertion point after clicking. However, any subsequent text entry action begins at the blank space where the click occurred and the cursor appears.
- Words are occasionally split in the middle when text is wrapped in Layout mode. Leaving Layout mode and returning to it fixes this.
- When documents are opened using the Open Recent selection in the File, they occasionally are opened with the top of their window under the header Control bar so the commands are not accessible without closing the header Control bar moving the window and re-opening the Control bar.
- Major table border outlines in Layout mode when using the Text Tool occasionally disappear. This is fixed by scrolling the areas with the missing borders out of view and then back again.
Three of the other five GoLive CS2 bugs (#2, #3 and #5) are occasional and have not yet shown up in our use of GoLive 9.0--hopefully, they have been squashed. The fourth (#6) appears to have been fixed and we have not used GoLive 9.0 enough so the fifth (#7) has not yet appeared.
In summary
Adobe GoLive 9.0 is an improved and worthy successor to GoLive CS2. We found GoLive 9.0's new user interface to be clean and efficient and relatively simple to pick up. Its features will satisfy most Web site developers and managers, especially those using Intel-based Macs. It does have more bugs than we had hoped and not all of those that remained in GoLive CS2 through version 8.0.1 were squashed. But none of the bugs are show stoppers and we expect that most will get eliminated with a patch in due course.
Adobe GoLive 9.0 is $399 for the full version or $169 as an upgrade. A 30-day demo version is available. [Bill Fox].
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