Adobe GoLive CS2 Upgrade (Mac) [Old Version]

List Price: $169.00

Features:

• Adobe GoLive CS2 helps you unlock the power of CSS, with intuitive visual tools that build more sophisticated sites. Take your ideas to new places with powerful mobile authoring tools based on CSS/XHTML, SVG Tiny, SMIL, and other global standards. Jump-start your designs by easily converting Adobe InDesign layouts into Web pages. Design Web and mobile content in an advanced, standards-based coding environment. Gain the freedom and flexibility of building on open standards, while leveraging your
• Author and validate standards-compliant CSS content for mobile devices, using simple visual tools
• Develop for mobile using global industry standards - features a complete development environment for CSS, XHTML, SVG Tiny, SMIL, MPEG-4, and more
• View SVG-t content in split-view interfaces, for quicker development of mobile applications
• Track and manage everything in your site, from assets to links, uploading content using Secure FTP and WebDAV via SSH or SSL

Customer Reviews:

the less exciting stepbrother [Posted on 2005-12-07]
It's Monday December 5, 2005, and my review on Adobe GoLive CS2 is due. Here's the problem, or should I say "problems." First of all, it's very difficult for a non-professional reviewer to thoroughly investigate all the nuances of a sophisticated web design program like GoLive CS2 in the time alloted for this sort of thing. Wading through the intricate process of actually using an application to design a web site, which is the only way to really shake out the good and bad habits GoLive might exhibit is daunting and barely doable in such a short time. Review coordinators and software developers need to take this into consideration when reviewers take on such a task. Truly, twice the 26 days alloted would provide for more thorough and insightful reviews.

But the bigger issue here is:

This past weekend, Adobe finalized its deal to buy Macromedia, developer of the outstanding web design and management program "Dreamweaver." And already today, Adobe announced a new product, the Adobe Web Bundle which oddly includes both GoLive AND Dreamweaver 8!

Let's face it, the only reason many folks use GoLive in the first place is that it comes with the Creative Suite 2 Premium version. I have a feeling that users will begin to pronounce a preference for replacing GoLive with Dreamweaver in Creative Suite Premium or Web Bundle, or whatever it comes to be called.

What does this mean for the future of GoLive? Surely Adobe will not continue to offer two such similar products, each requiring its own development team. And since Dreamweaver has proven to be the product of choice among the majority of web developers, (and since GoLive doesn't really follow the model wherein all Adobe products work and play nicely with each other anyway) can the demise of the GoLive product be far behind? (Remember Adobe PageMill, anyone?)

According to a story today on the Macworld website, Pierre Van Beneden, an Adobe vice president, confirmed that layoffs would occur in jobs where there is duplication. If I were a member of the GoLive development team, I'd tell the kids to plan on finding rather modest gifts under the tree this year.

That said, on with the review.

Adobe GoLive CS2 represents a real improvement over the last version of GoLive that I used, though that would be expected since the last version I owned was version 4.0.1. It's come a long way in the interim.

Witness the new power GoLive CS2 gives you to work with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets, a fantastic improvement in layout and design for the web). GoLive CS2 has made it much easier to create your CSS, with some nice tools and canned "Block Objects," drag-and-drop objects that contain ready-made layout helpers. Just drop in an object to, say, create a layout with resizing columns. No messing with tables. Good, I hated using tables to force a layout into submission.

There's also support for favicons, those goofy little miniature icons that appear here-and-there in the browser. The problem with favicons is that they need to be excruciatingly plain in order to be recognizable to most eyes as anything but a blotch of pixels. Any attempt at creating anything with the least bit of subtlety results in an unrecognizable mess. Useless eye candy, as far as I can tell. But should your aesthetic vary from my own, the tools for creating the little buggers are available in GoLive.

Adobe Bridge, a revised version of Photoshops' Browser, (almost) works with the entire Creative Suite, and GoLive is no exception. So it's a little easier to identify and bring in the jpegs and gifs that you created in Photoshop and Illustrator.

But I still don't understand why Bridge works so poorly with InDesign documents. All you see when looking at an InDesign file in Bridge is an InDesign icon. Bridge shows individual elements of the InDesign document, but not the layout, which seems to be the whole idea of an InDesign document. So unless you have made a PDF of the InDesign file, you only see an icon and filename.

Doubtless, Bridge will be updated to fully support the newly acquired Dreamweaver, et al. While Adobe is adding that support, I hope the coding geniuses figure out how to make Bridge take something less than the life cycle of a mayfly to launch. I'm not kidding, you could watch the grass grow in the time it takes Bridge to pull its code together and get around to doing something besides launching. Ahrgg...

InDesign CS2 includes an option for getting your project ready for the web with "Package for GoLive..." Selecting this option from the InDesign File menu and then importing the file into GoLive via the File menus "Import From InDesign" selection converts the file into XHML and morphs your document into a web site complete with multiple pages. It makes a nice way to start off a web site that already contains many of the elements already contained in your InDesign layout. Your work isn't over though, unless you are willing to settle for GoLive's plane-vanilla conversion. But at the very least, it provides a template to start with.

The swatch pallet in GoLive CS2 now sports tabs for each of the swatch collections you wish to have readily available. Just click on the tab to switch between swatches. A small but nice feature.

But see, here's what I mean about Adobe not being consistent with the GoLive interface and the other Creative Suite 2 applications. In Photoshop, my tool of choice for photo manipulation, collapsing a palette requires a double-click on the title bar of the palette. But in GoLive CS2, double-clicking on the title bar gets you nowhere. You click a little triangle to accomplish this task. The palettes in GoLive don't work the same as palettes in Photoshop and Illustrator. A small-potatoes difference, but illustrative of the lack of consistency in Creative Suite 2.

One more thing, GoLive CS2 also has tools for creating those itty bitty versions of sites for mobile devices. They are all the rage, and will surely continue to grow (pun intended) in popularity as more folks buy phones and PDAs with browsing capabilities.

Actually, there are lots of other things, but as with all super-powerhouse applications, it would take more than a month to come into contact with them all. I just touched on a few of what I found to be the best features.

So what's the bottom line here?

If you already have a knowledge base acquired from experience with previous versions of GoLive, the CS2 update is probably worthwhile, if for nothing else, the CSS improvements in this version. Or, if you already received GoLive CS2 as part of the Creative Suite 2 Premium version, of course you will use it. No reason not to.

But if I were a Dreamweaver guy, I'd not be running out to pick up a copy of GoLive just right now. Some permutation of GoLive and Dreamweaver is almost surely to emerge from the bowels of Adobe's coding dungeons sometime real soon now or at least eventually. Maybe they will combine the site-oriented philosophy of GoLive with the superior coding ability of Dreamweaver to create an über web tool like no one has seen before. We'll just have to wait and see.

Sold by the suite, must upgrade by the suite. [Posted on 2005-12-12]
Heads up, if you bought Adobe Creative Suite 1 and then buy an upgrade like this one planning to upgrade just part of it, you're in for a rude awakening.

In others words, "Adobe don't play that." What you buy in a suite collected package, can only be upgraded the same way, which makes little sense, but hey they're the ones who wrote the code.

It's all or nothing, when it comes to upgrades.

So difficult, it hurts. [Posted on 2006-08-25]
There was a time when there were applications, like PageMill, for people who needed a nice looking website but not every feature, option, protocol known to man. But now its pretty much all or nothing and GoLive gives you everything except ease of use, along with a host of non-intuitive icons to keep you guessing. To be fair, most of these exotic features, which used to crash everyone's browser can now be made to work--if you are a professional web designer. Then again, companies like Amazon and eBay seem to get by with simple websites so maybe there's a market for web software that just does the basics.

After stacks of books, a $400 class and finally an Adobe support contract, I've gotten a decent website out of GoLive. But I dread making changes to the site because I can always count on GoLive to throw new obstacles in my way.

Don't put ANY money into ANY version on ANY platform of GoLive! [Posted on 2007-07-03]
GoLive CS2 gets ZERO stars. Having worked with GoLive since 2003 on Macintosh, in February 2007 I upgraded to CS2 -- piece of crapola -- big mistake. "1 star" is one too many!

GoLive used to be a nice program. Whether you are an old user or thinking of getting it anew, don't. I regret upgrading to GoLive CS2 -- and Adobe won't make it right granting suckers like me a $200 upgrade to Dreamweaver (vs. $400). Adobe offers GoLive 9 via their website, but don't fall for it. Adobe is phasing out GoLive. Shame on Adobe! If I had any choice, I'd dump Adobe in a second, but Dreamweaver is the only game in town for Macintosh. Adobe, because you've abandoned your GoLive users: you s_ck! Talk about greed.

Summary: If you buy any GoLive version on any platform, you're throwing your money away. Don't make my mistake. I am out the cost of GoLive CS2 ($180) plus another $200 in GoLive CS2 how-to books. Am I bitter? You betcha.

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