*** From the Archives ***
This article is from August 14, 2011, and is no longer current.
From the Creators of InDesign – Adobe Muse
Today Adobe released Muse as a public beta. Muse lets anyone design and build websites without needing to write a line of code. Even if you have never created a website before, anyone who has a working knowledge of InDesign will feel right at home and should be able to create their own website very quickly. While Muse may seem like a new application, it should feel quite familiar to everyone at InDesign Secrets since some of the engineers that work on InDesign have also worked on Muse. In fact, former InDesign Product Manager Michael Ninness worked on Muse before leaving Adobe to work at Lynda.com.
If you want to see Muse in action, I recorded a small video series at Lynda.com that takes you through a quick preview of the Muse Beta.
Workflow
Muse is designed to have a simple workflow that uses 4 main views (similar to Adobe Lightroom): Plan, Design, Preview and Publish.
The plan view is similar to the pages panel in InDesign. It allows you to plot the structure of your website. Using master pages it is easy to keep your pages header, footers and backgrounds consistent.
The design view is where you will spend most of your time in Muse and you layout your design and make changes.
If you are ready to test your interactivity, switch to preview and Muse renders the website via webkit in the app for quick testing
When you are finished with your site you can publish it online with a few clicks in the publish view.
Keeping it in the Family
Since Muse and InDesign were developed by the many of same people, you will see some similar features including:
- Paragraph and Character Styles
- Assets (links) Panel
- Swatches
- Text Controls
- Text Wrap
- Master Pages
- Smart Guides
- Similar shortcuts
- Familiar Adobe Interface
In addition to the familiar tools and features, Muse works pretty much the same as InDesign. You still go to File > Place (cmd/ctrl+D) to bring in your graphics (.psd, .jpg, .png, .gif), add text, and finish your layout. Instead of exporting to a PDF or printing like you would with InDesign, with Muse you either export your site as HTML with CSS/JavaScript or upload it automatically to Adobe Business Catalyst.
This is Only the Beginning
In addition to the normal layout features there are a lot of web features that are very easy to add to your site including:
- Arbitrary HTML (Google Maps, YouTube Videos, Twitter, Facebook, etc)
- Slideshows
- Lightboxes
- URLs
- Flexiblie Widths
- Header/Footers
- Auto-generated navigation
- Tabbed and accordion panels
This is not meant to be an exhaustive review, but more of a quick teaser to let you know what Muse is all about. To learn more about Muse, download your own copy, and to participate in the public beta visit muse.adobe.com
If you have any questions about Muse, please put them in the comments and I would love to do my best to keep up with them.
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I am salivating about this, James. Great news. I for one have been a CS Design Premium customer forever but Dreamweaver has always sat idle in my toolbox. I wonder how Muse will enter into the picture.
Marty Safir
Looks very nice, like a simple Dreamweaver for people who want to get it done quickly. There are bound to be a few bugs but that’s a given.
Looks interesting, but the question is how well it works in practice. Most professional sites are still hand-coded for a reason, I hope Muse is the product that changes that.
What I’m most interested to see is an integration in the InCopy workflow system, as that should open up quite a few possibilities without requiring huge investment in a system integrator’s publishing workflow product, which is overkill for smaller projects.
My biggest gripe so far (based on those screenshots) is that they are using their own home-made weird widgets (possibly even Flash) for the interface again. Apart from looking out of place, those are traditionally annoying in that they don’t scroll properly, don’t support all OS shortcuts and drag and drop in text fields, sometimes look strangely soft when resized (like the toolbar in Flash), break in one way or another whenever there is a minor OS update, are slow to refresh and feel somehow sluggisch, are inconsistent, and in general never behave quite the way you expect them to. When switching between platforms a lot, it becomes especially annoying, because you never know whether it uses the platform standards (as you would intuitively expect because that’s how all the other software works) or a special Adobe standard or the system standard of the other platform.
@Peter
Great question about InCopy like integration. I doubt that InCopy would ever work, but since Muse has integration with Business Catalyst it is logical to think that at some point it could allow in browser editing. This would mean that if you were logged in to the site, you could hit a little pencil on any area and then edit the text live.
Regarding the widgets, the interface itself it Adobe Air. This means that the entire application is quite small and lightweight, the installer itself is only 6mb. A current limitation is that OS keyboard shortcuts do not work in open dialog boxes, but when Adobe AIR 3.0 ships that will hopefully solve that problem.
Another benefit of using AIR is that Muse would also run on Linux. I don’t think that they officially support it, but it should work.
FYI – the widgets in Muse (for slideshows, light boxes, etc) are jQuery Based. When you export the site, it creates a JavaScript folder with for the widgets like you would if you were hand coding the site.
@person287 Yes, there are probably going to be bugs, but that is why it is a public beta. If you come across any, let them know.
Don’t get too excited everybody. This looks like another one of those Air/Flash experiments that Adobe usually stops development for after about a year.
When will they ever learn that Flash is not a platform for full-fledged programs…
Looks fantastic. I’ve been waiting for something like this lol. I don’t like coding at all.
Without CMS it is very limited.
It sort of reminds me of Freeway, n’est pas?
I will give it a go though, it looks good.
Tim,
Adobe has hinted that they are going to integrate their Business Catalyst CMS into Muse in the future. Remember, this is a public beta and the product isn’t’ even shipping yet. That means they will be adding more features over time.
Oh, this looks brilliant. I’m trying very hard not to use GoLive any more in case I upgrade to Lion but, try as I might with the very good tutorials at lynda.com, I cannot get my head around DW, especially as I rarely set up more than one website a year! Hope Adobe includes it in the CS soon …
Feedback I got from a lot of people is that the code is absolutely horrific and/or bloated. I don’t know cos I can’t tell.
I am sure that the code isn’t as clean as if a human wrote it, but you have to determine yourself if it is clean enough. I would not saw the code is amazing or terrible, just good enough for what I need.
Think about it this way, I am sure that there are people who can program cleaner postscript code than InDesign’s export. InDesign’s export does a good enough, in fact great export to postscript/pdf.
Overtime Muse’s code export improve as more people use it and report their findings.
Not so sure about the subscribing thingie: a license oke, but a monthly or yearly fee? And how to work off line with subcribtion?
Hmmmm….
I understand the apprehension towards subscriptions, and I too wish it was available for purchase outright. The main reason that they want subscriptions is so that they can push out updates quicker (CMS, support for new browsers, more widgets, etc).
I imagine that you would be able to work offline as long as you were online at least once per month to confirm your subscription was in good standing. This is how the current subscription model works for the CS apps.
I started watching the Lynda.com videos on this program. I think this is going to be big…finally, a website creation software tool for people familiar with InDesign. Thank you, Adobe!
>. The main reason that they want subscriptions is so that they can push out updates quicker (CMS, support for new browsers, more widgets, etc).
??? I fail to see the connection here, why should you not be able to download updates when you bought a license for example by auto-update? I do not see why a subscription should have any advantage…?
Two words: Sarbanes Oxley
From what I have been told, Adobe can’t release new features for existing applications unless they charge for them. That is why you will never get any new features from InDesign unless they charge you.
By having a subscription model, they are able to continually give you new features not be in violation of Sarbanes Oxley.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or play one on TV. Therefore I can not attest to this legality of this. I am just repeating what I know.
@ James,
Actually, I think Adobe is more interested in having a constant revenue stream than they can get for selling products on an 18- to 24-month cycle.
I’m also not a lawyer, but Apple faced the same thing with their mobile operating system, iOS. They wanted to be able to do updates to the software and pass them on to existing users of iPhones and iPads. As I understood it, they got around Sarbanes Oxley another way. They didn’t require a subscription for buying an iPhone or iPad. Instead, they deferred part of their claimed revenue as reported for the product (didn’t report it all at purchase time). So there’s more than one way of doing it.
@Steve
If there is a will, there is a way. Hopefully Adobe will hear all of the chatter and complaining about subscriptions and maybe offer the option for people to buy it outright.
I think there needs to be more divs, unused scripts and none aggregated resources to make it a true winner.
Not to mention XHTML? now that is forward thinking!
I’ve downloaded the Muse beta, and I’ve started to go through James’ tutorial. It looks to be a very impressive piece of software. It’s amazing how many things match InDesign’s interface choices, which is gratifying, and make it easy to learn.
However, I’ve been reading through comments on the Muse beta site. It seems pretty apparent that there’s a lot of resistance to a subscription model.
Here’s a link to a long thread on the beta forum on the subject:
https://getsatisfaction.com/muse/topics/why_is_muse_sold_by_subscription_only
I think Adobe really needs to rethink ONLY offering this model, and not selling it also as a software package.
The subscription certainly puts paid to my designing 1-2 websites per year. I’m so disappointed with Adobe.
@James
I had a brief look last night, it looks very straigtforward so I am going to build a site with it soon.
With CMS (mainly WordPress) this could be superpowerful
@Tim
CMS support is coming in the future, but it will most likely be whatever type of CMS that Business Catalyst uses. I would not expect to see WordPress support.
Argh! Why a whole new application? Why can’t we just use InDesign and save each page to our website? (I know this sounds simplistic, but simplicity is what we’re after, isn’t it?) The same thing goes for ebooks. There’s still a hell of a lot of under-the-hood stuff that needs to be done between ID and the ebook format.
Of course, we’re in the 21st century already and STILL don’t have our flying cars and jet packs.
Richard, currently there is both more and less possible in Web pages/eBooks than InDesign allows. I’m thinking of Javascript, page scaling, animations, forms, font size and style, viewport rotation and resizing.
I feel the differences still outweigh the similarities (let me think. They both can handle text and images — only not the same type of images).
This dumbed-down version of DW would be perfect for me, but the [monthly] subscription cost and having to host all sites on Adobe Business Catalyst, (at an additional charge) is a deal-breaker.
Looks really interesting and relly simple. Seems to be perfect to get a qiuck start and have good results very fast.
@chuck you don’t have to use Adobe to host, you can do it yourself
The code Muse produces is getting a major hammering (laughed at) on Reddit, not good.
https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/jjj5d/wtf_look_at_the_code_if_the_new_adobe_muse_site/
Ah the anonymity of the internet.
I’ve talked to some people that are outraged by the code. These are good web designers that code by hand and nothing else other than hand coded websites is acceptable.
Then I’ve talked to other web designers who welcome Muse and think it’s great. They also hand code website.
Then I talked to some designers, who use InDesign, and they think it’s magnificent and will be a great addition to making digital content without having to outsource to other companies to build stuff.
This will have a niché market. It will have it’s haters, lovers and players.
I do think by the sounds of everything I heard that the code really needs to be better. But it’s in Beta. So sit back, relax and let them get to it.
No point in hating something that’s only in Beta?
I agree Eugene, it is Reddit after all, hopefully the developers will be taking notice as well though, at Beta it’s all about the feedback.
In the end this product will only really succeed if the code it produces doesn’t get laughed off the playing field. As much as the argument for an easy to use wysiwyg web page builder is always been a good one, it has always been hard to make work.
Thanks Tim, I stand corrected.
I mis-read an article on Adobe that steered you toward using there Business Cataylist Service.
But Adobe clearly states we can use any “third party hostying provider”.
https://muse.adobe.com/faq.html
Sorry to all.
Wake me when one of these website in a box apps generates source code that’s not complete garbage.
Go the to Muse home page (which was apparently built using Muse) and do a view source. Here’s a sample: https://i.imgur.com/uMFo0.jpg
Garbage.
I’ve begun building a site in Muse, and I’m delighted with the way some of it works. Some of the Air-born interface elements are a bit rough compared to what we’re used to, but I haven’t come across anything that’s flat broken.
As far as code goes, I’m a relative beginner compared to those on the hand-code-only echelon, but the concerns about bloat are not without justification. Exporting HTML/CSS/JS from Muse, then opening in DW reveals a complex CSS maze of compound selectors, some possibly hundreds of characters long, resulting from bottomless div-nesting. Lines and lines of HTML and script attached to even blank pages belie the anticipatory output model required by a no-code design tool.
It’s pretty safe to say what happens in Muse will probably be staying in Muse.
Yeah the code is horrible. No human’s going to be able to (or would want to) edit that. We’re slowly getting to a place where bandwidth isn’t as much of a concern (for some sites) so I may be able to look past the very large filesizes (and they are large and slow to load), but the fixed heights cause text to get cut off needlessly when font size is changed. This is an issue for mobile devices that automatically enlarge typesize or for vision impaired users that enlarge the size.
I’d be excited if they could perfect an app like this, but looking at the Muse website as an example, it doesn’t impress me. Seems like it doesn’t produce very good webpages :(
Dan,
If you (or anyone else) has any other constructive feedback regarding the code. Please leave comments on the muse forum at https://getsatisfaction.com/muse
They really like it when you can give them examples of the problem that you are seeing rather than, “the code is bloated”
Here is a great writeup about a designers thought on Muse.
https://www.visualarms.com/
Yes I didn’t understand what “bloated” meant for web page code. I know it means too much code. But it’s nice to see the examples and hear how it affects things.
@Chuck I thought the same at first, it does steer you to thinking it’s a closed model.
@James Thanks for the link to visual arms, an interesting view on Muse, the code bloat does bother me, however, as an Indesign professional, the ease of use pulls me in. A friend recently asked if I would make a little site for his Gardening business, it seems like the prefect project to use Muse on, free as a favour to a friend. So I will give it a go.
It seems that the code issue is the main challenge for the dev team to overcome, is clean code from wysiwyg software the holy grail of web graphics?
Adobe used to be cool with PS5 (last fast photoshop), AI 8-10(last few illustrators with thought out interface), ID 1-CS3(last few realy innovative InDesigns) and SVG advocacy.
After they acquired Flash they should have sent bullet through its ugly head. Instead they decided to be harmful to the web environment. I can understand Flash. It is too expensive to be put to sleep.
But WYSIWIG webpage layout tool? WYSIWIG is required for Photoshop and Illustrator. It is slightly detrimental for effective use of InDesign, but it is a perverse idea for wepage layout tool.
I’m not a web designer so my opinion is not based on proffesionalism. It is based on ethics. It took web environment some time to recover from attrocities comitted by these kind of programs in nineties. It makes me sad to see that people are again encouraged in bad practises and offered another sacharine flavoured poison from the likes of Microsoft, Apple or Adobe. All in name of the stakeholders’ greed.
Marcel (rant over)
PageMill 1.0
Muse will have a place. It’s still in very beta stages currently, and feedback I have from the engineering team is that the code output is very much a work in progress. They’ve been concentrating on browser compatibility as a first priority. A lot of the UI elements are pretty rough-cut as yet, too.
The big concern I raised was that the output code has to be human-compatible, and I was reassured that this is not an area that’s being neglected. I think it will take a while, because code optimization, far less code friendliness, is no simple thing to program.
As a site design and prototyping tool, Muse is already very strong, and there’s a great deal to love about it. InDesign users will find some of the current UI a little backwards and annoying. You can’t define a Character or Paragraph style then apply it, for example. You must create the text the way you want it, then create a new style. There’s no “right-click to edit style” yet, and you can’t drag out a guide, but these kinds of things we’re used to from InDesign are in the works.
Back in the day, assembler programmers hooted with derision at high-level languages, high-level language coders hooted with derision at 4GLs, and so on. “Bloat!” was the denunciation. “Garbage code!” Faster hardware and better bandwidth, though, long relegated those issues to “mostly harmless,” and compilers have become smarter and more efficient over the decades.
Broadband penetration makes site code, size of, much less of an issue than it was a decade ago, and if the planned work from the Muse team makes the code output simpler and less user-hostile, Muse stands a chance to become a good addition to the design arsenal. No automatic code generator is ever going to match the spartan efficiency of hand coding, but that isn’t the main point. Time-to-market is.
The buzz is interesting: web devs are variously up in arms, hooting with derision or worried that designers will not think they’re unnecessary; non-coder design people are dancing in the streets. The reality is somewhere between the two extremes.
As it stands now, Muse is not going to be adopted by web professionals, many of whom regard even Dreamweaver as bloated and ugly. Fair enough. It’s not intended for them. And, for the time being at least, it’s not the tool to use if you are going to hand a site off to a webmaster to maintain or if it’s CMS-based, like a WordPress or Joomla site. There are no dynamic site tools built in as yet.
But a print designer could create a personal portfolio site that would be perfectly functional across all browsers in a very short amount of time, and creating a fully working prototype for client approval can be done faster and much more effectively than it would take using other existing tools, and that’s a potential win across the boards.
@ Alan
Thanks Alan, for the sane overview, I have no doubt that the end goal in the Muse development will be manageable output. I will be very happy to have it as a go to for those “little” sites we get asked for as designers, that don’t have enough resources to have more than a few days spent on them.
Despite the shouts of derision I am looking forward to using Muse, lets not forget its in its early public beta stage.
@Alan As someone who was intimately involved on getting the Muse project approved and funded as a new product, I can say what you wrote nicely summarizes most of the original “pitch”. Muse isn’t for developers or hand-coders. (Unless they want a quick prototyping tool to sketch out their ideas before committing to the much more expensive activity of hand-coding…) It should also be noted that matching the exact quality of hand-coders was not part of the original pitch or promise — which in my opinion would be a complete waste of time, not to mention a moving target.
Apparently, judging by the online proclamations of “garbage”, a large percentage of hand-coders seem unable to judge a product outside the lens of their own expertise and experience. Their response to millions of designers who want to participate in web publishing is simply “learn to code”. I have a hunch that they’ve forgotten how long they’ve spent mastering their craft. The barrier to entry in 2011 is immensely more complicated than it was, say 10 years ago…
The team talked to enough of those designers who said “no thanks” and literally begged Adobe to build Muse for them. Quicker.
As a graphic design professional and college professor who is trying to evangelize design students about the need to learn all they can about web design this is a welcome tool.
I hear the valid concerns of web code purists and also understand that the objections may in small part be about job security – if anyone can create a website- it is of course doubtful that technology will ever develop to the point where techies will become obsolete. But I am old enough to remember my panic driven design elders tell me that computers would eliminate the need for graphic designers. We all know that it only expanded the need for them.
But back to the subject of Muse — I am going to give it a try and see where it goes. there are of course other resources for drag and drop web design like https://www.imcreator. The big plus for Must of course is that if you are familiar with InDesign the learning curve is less steep.
I do have a concern about subscription based web apps and eventual unbalance of power and control it can lead to. it will be an interesting ride to say the least.
I would have to say congrats to Adobe. I have been working with Adobe since PageMaker came on floppies (what’s a floppy?) Now that I have dated myself. I would like to say I have no desire to learn code and never will. I have been farming out web design since the beginning. Being a typographer by nature.. just hate web design. I want an em space next to a photo you just give up. I have tried to grasp DW and thanks to Lynda.com have been able to get a few simple sites out which I will not put my name to, but for freebies they work.
First! Muse will never take a hand coders job away for complex sites. But, with advancements in bandwidth and software coders are not GODS anymore. I am really sick of these web designers who feel they can hold you up and keep digging in your pockets for more coin.
Adobe is not putting coders out of business, they are just giving us designers a better tool to get the message out faster. I would love to be able to make a text correction on our company site without having to email “GOD” and wait for him to finish watching wrestling on TV and finishing his energy drink just to leave an orphan on the page.
I like what I see so far and hope Adobe keeps going forward…
Thanks for the venting. Webdesign has always been a thorn in my side.
I have been working with Muse for several weeks now, and my major complaint about it so far is its lack of forms support. There are third-party form generators I have tried, but they do not work on all platforms — I host my own sites one place but have a client who prefers another server. I’ve tested a redesign of the client’s site and uploaded to both places, and they come out looking differently — that is, they work one place and not the other. The pages with forms work sometimes, sometimes not, sometimes are okay with graphics embedded, sometimes won’t work if graphics are present, so forth and so on. And even the way I apply the HTML to the Muse page seems to matter — whether I just paste it, or apply it via Object>Insert HTML — the forms act differently either way!
These kinds of glitches are annoying, and they definitely are making me rethink the possibility of subscribing. I was excited about Muse and had planned to switch all my designing over to it (I am a print designer who has forced myself to use Dreamweaver up till now but it is not intuitive to me). But if I can’t make forms work, and if the export to HTML continues to be inconsistent from server to server, I’ll likely find myself paying a monthly fee just to keep on experimenting instead of getting any value from the program or the subscription. I’m not willing to do that.
I’m in agreement with an earlier poster who suggested a license (say, annual) rather than a monthly subscription.
I also don’t intend to use Business Catalyst for hosting. Most of my sites are self-ventures, so I don’t have enough clients to charge back to cover the costs of hosting each site on BC. But the export to HTML problems are causing such headaches that I may not be able to use Muse at all on my own chosen servers. And of course, I like the BC forms support (at least it works), but I’m not going to pay for BC just to get that forms support.
All this thoroughly disappoints me. It looks like I’m going to have to go back to Dreamweaver, at this rate. It is an equal struggle, and doesn’t have the fun widgets I’d like to use in Muse, but at least it exports correctly (mostly) and I already own it.
@C. Sinclaire: Well… please notice the huge BETA in the program’s name. Not even 1.0! It’s early days for this program yet.
Hi, I’m wondering if we still can make use of the adobe beta in the future after the real version is launched. Wondering if anyone know the answer. Thanks a lot!
@yamcha
The Muse beta will work until the shipping version is released sometime in quarter 1 of 2012.
When 1.0 is released you can try it out for 30 days before purchasing it like all of Adobe’s software.
Thanks a lot for the information James:)!
It is sad that the market that Adobe is targeting is not smart enough to know what is wrong with Muse. These newly minted ‘web designers’ are oblivious to the vicious lock-in and the inaccessibility of Muse-generated sites.
Contrary to a previous suggestion, Muse is certainly not a threat to anyone’s job security (if such a threat were to exist, we would have seen it a decade ago with similar HTML generators). I’ve seen many designers salivating at the opportunity to redo sites mangled in Muse.
Muse’s success does not hang on the Muse program: it hangs on Business Catalyst. Adobe is trying to get into the hosting business when there are already plenty of other services that allow non-web designers to design/create and host web sites with a single (and most often lower) service charge. Adobe is really gambling in this market by charging twice: once for the design program and again for hosting. Adobe’s complex pricing is going to scare consumers to easier and cheaper services.
What irritates me most about Adobe’s marketing of Muse is that they propose that there is a difference between ‘coders’ and ‘designers’. They do not seem to allow the consideration that professional web designers have enough brain cells to translate their design into HTML. The Muse forums are filled with self-appointed design experts that foolishly think they can identify which web sites on the internet were created by a ‘coder’ and which were created by a ‘designer’. Oy.
Hi,
I am new to adobe muse, I chose it to create some sample wire-frames. I have a question, as every time I click on objects and select menus, there is only 2 menus comes out all the time?? can I add more menus the same way as I could add extra accordion if required in muse?