Adobe GoLive 6

Review by Peren Bjork

I've been using GoLive in one incarnation or another for about 6 years now. It was called GoLive CyberStudio and it came bundled with some software that I can't remember, so the price was right. Also, it was a WYSIWYG page editor (I've never been very fond of coding by hand) that was more powerful than Claris HomePage for making basic websites without many bells and whistles. Rest assured I won't go waxing poetic about Claris HomePage, only to say it kept me away from MS FrontPage (Yuck!). Around 1999, Adobe was trolling around for a web page editor of their own and hooked GoLive (the company that developed CyberStudio), brought it into the fold and Adobe GoLive was born (reborn?... cloned?). Released as version 4 (the last CyberStudio was version 3), the program was basically the CyberStudio product with an the distinctive Adobe interface placed on it. With version 5, Adobe really made GoLive its own, refining the interface further, adding support for style sheets and javascript, introducing of a palette for easily creating rollover buttons without seeing any code (and a good thing, too... more on that later), and other improvements and additions. All in all it's a pretty powerful application, though not considered quite on par with Macromedia's Dreamweaver by many. This review won't be drawing comparisons with Dreamweaver simply because I have no experience with that application. However, judging from other reviews I have read, the choice brtween the two has gotten a little harder. This will be examining GoLive on its own merit and making comparisons with the previous version.

Adobe GoLive 6 is the first GoLive offering to run natively in OS X (compatible with 10.1 and higher) as well as OS 9. For many, this may be the most important or at least most notable improvement. In my experience, version 5 worked well enough in Classic mode but exporting sites didn't always work correctly and general operation just felt a little rough. I found myself going back to OS 9 just to be safe. These issues appear to be resolved running version 6 natively in OS X. General operation felt smoother in this version. I took a site that I had been maintaining with version 5 and opened it right up in version 6 with no problems (something that could not be said for the transition from version 4 to version 5). It should be noted that once you save a v. 5 site in v. 6 you can't go back, so it's a good idea to keep your last good copy of the old one on hand until you're ready to go forward without reservation. Once safely up and running in v. 6, I tried a couple quick exports of the site, one flat and one with separate Pages and Media folders, and everything worked just great.

When working in the GoLive workspace it tended to get a little crowded, especially on a smaller Monitor (1024 x 768 or smaller). GoLive 6 adds a couple of nice interface enhancements to help with this problem. Palette Stashing allows you to grab a palettes tab and drag it to the right edge of the screen and "stash" it off the desktop. A small tab remains visible to call it back when needed. Command-J toggles hiding or revealing all palettes. Custom Workspace settings are also a nice addition. These allow a user to save the configuration of the workspace, such as palette size and position, and revert back to it when things get out of hand. You know how it goes, you get on a roll and start cranking out some work, moving palettes, opening new ones, and all of a sudden you've got a real mess on your hands. Just call up a saved workspace setting and presto!, order is restored. I wish I had a setting like that for my home office. This is also useful for working on different types of pages which require different sets of palettes, such as regular web pages and pages with dynamic content. Just create custom settings for each and save yourself the time to open and close the right palettes for the job.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm not a big fan of coding by hand, so the thing I first loved about GoLive was that it was a WYSIWYG web editor, I didn't have to deal with HTML code when designing a site. As my abilities developed I realized that to be really effective at web page design, it does help to know about HTML and to be able to tweak the code when necessary. With GoLive 6 you now have 3 ways (up from 2) to view and edit code for a web page. Added in this version is the source split view to see the WYSIWYG layout view and the page source at the same time in the same window. Option clicking on the source split view button puts the source pane on the right, top, left or back on the bottom (the default) of the layout pane. When designing web pages, if you want to have any kind of control over page layout, you need to know how to work with tables. GoLive 5 made creating and manipulating tables pretty straightforward. The trouble I had was that it was a bit touchy when it came to selecting stuff inside the table, specifically whole cells. When clicking inside a cell of a table you get a cursor inside that call to edit the contents of that cell. When clicking on the border of the table, you usually get the cell itself to control height, width, rowspan, cellpadding and the like. These features remain in GoLive 6. But, many times I wished to select the whole table to edit its attributes. This requires clicking between the cell and the border, usually a space of about a pixel. It required a steady hand and a bit of luck. Imagine my delight to find the table layout palette in the new version (Fig. 1). Not only does it make this selection process much easier, it also includes visual aids like dimensions of cells, along with total dimensions for the table, eliminating the need for pixel counting in your head. The palette's zoom in and out feature makes working with nested tables a one click affair.

These days, web designers have the choice of designing to a specific browser or to a standard. I have gravitated to the standards camp and, as such, was happy to see the check syntax option in the new version of GoLive. This item, found under the Edit menu, allows you to check the page you're working on against a number of different standards -including most of the W3C HTML and XHTML standards. It's nice to be able to do this inside the program rather than checking each page of the site online or with a separate checker program. If you like rollover buttons, and let's face it, who doesn't like rollover buttons?, GoLive (versions 5 and 6) provides an easy palette-based way to put them on your web page. Behind the scenes, GoLive generates the javascript code necessary to make your rollovers come to life. Unlike the regular HTML, though, the code generated is by no means basic. Not for the faint of heart, indeed. In version 5, a "simple" rollover created a good page and a half or two pages of javascript code. I wouldn't call it sloppy, I think the folks at Adobe were just covering for every possible direction, however advanced, the user might go. GoLive 6 cleans it up a bit, but it still is more advanced than I want to deal with.

This brings me to writing javascript and inserting it in a web page by hand. In an effort to expand my web horizons, I started to see what it takes to make my own javascript code. Indeed, I learned that the code for a simple rollover is far simpler than that generated by GoLive (I assume this is probably the case for many WYSIWYG Web editors). When I put homebrewed javascript that reference files in the site into a page in GoLive, those file references don't always translate at the export phase. They have to be updated by hand. Maybe I'm missing something. I don't know. I will say this for the GoLive generated javascript, when run through the syntax checker, it does pass muster with W3C validation and, ultimately it's just text, so it doesn't really weigh down a site with file size. There are two new features in the latest version of GoLive that I wasn't able to test out deserve mention.

GoLive 6 now supports WML, i-mode and WAP authoring to visually design content for web enabled cell phones and other wireless devices. For those developing websites in a team environment, GoLive's Web Workgroup Server may well be worth the purchase price. Site administrators can manage files so they are available to the workgroup with different access privileges for different members of the group. Files can be checked in or out so only one person can open a page at a time. It can keep track of revisions on a file and allows you to revert back to an older version if necessary. It can even make page templates which allow changes and updates only in predefined areas. Adobe continues to polish GoLive and the latest upgrade is very worthwhile for both professional and recreational web designers. For OS X users it's pretty much a must have.

System Requirements:

Client

PowerPC processor (G3 or G4 for OS X 10.1); Mac OS 9.1 or higher, Mac OS X 10.1 or higher (Native or Classic)
96MB RAM minimum (with virtual memory on), 128MB RAM recommended
90 MB available HD space
CDROM drive.

Workgroup Server

PowerPC G3 or G4 processor
Mac OS X 10.1 Native
96 MB RAM minimum (with virtual memory on), 128MB RAM recommended
150MB available HD space
CDROM drive.

Peren Bjork
Peregrine Graphics
360-546-0319