*** From the Archives ***
This article is from September 18, 2006, and is no longer current.
It’s Official: Acrobat 8 and DreamWeaver In, GoLive is Out
Adobe announced today that Acrobat 8 Professional will ship in Creative Suite version 2.3, which is scheduled to be released before the end of the year. Dreamweaver 8 will also be included in the upgrade. This confirms a longstanding rumor that Dreamweaver is replacing GoLive in the Creative Suite. However, Adobe also noted that GoLive will still be developed as a standalone product.
Acrobat 8 Professional adds several important features for creative professionals, including a print engine and transparency flattener controls shared with the rest of the Suite.
Adobe expects the upgrade from CS2 to CS2.3 to cost $159 (sounds like a pretty good deal if you want but don’t currently own Dreamweaver). You can find more information in Adobe’s press release.
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that was absolutely the right decision. Hooray!
As a long-time GoLive user (we’ve developed dozens of successful commercial sites with it), this is depressing but not surprising news.
Depressing, because I can’t imagine trying to maintain and modify some of the sites our studio is responsible for without GoLive-only features like the site window, In/Out links palette, smart objects with variables, save for web, and more.
Adobe bought GoLive from a third-party developer when it was the premiere web authoring program for the Mac, before Dreamweaver was even a speck in its daddy’s eye. They added a decent number of features to it over the years, many of which are still unmatched in Dreamweaver (which we sometimes use, reluctantly, when forced). But Dreamweaver was available for Windows (as well as Mac) long before GoLive was, as I recall, and in retrospect I guess this was a telling blow.
But I think Adobe’s laissez-faire attitude to the web developer market was the real telling blow over the long run. As a GoLive user/trainer, it’s been incredibly frustrating watching Adobe just sort of sit there with its knockout powerhouse of a product, and did relatively nothing to market it or grow its community, save for field staffers Adam Pratt’s and Lynn Grillo’s road presentations. (I can’t tell you how many times I saw other Adobe staffers talk about/demo the Creative Suite and forget to mention GoLive!) As an observer it was obvious that Adobe added GL as an afterthought to the Creative Suite.
All this for years, while Macromedia evangelized a robust Dreamweaver developer community, provided a slew of tutorials and forums on their web site for it, developed courseware, certified Dreamweaver training centers, encouraged and supported third-party plug-in developers (or whatever they called them … extensions? “behavior”-ists?), listed dozens of third-party books on Dreamweaver in Macromedia Press, and so on.
A few years ago, when Adobe came out with a new version of GoLive that was missing built-in database development features found in previous versions, the GoLive web dev community was shocked. The web was (and is) moving towards more dynamically-generated sites (like this one!), Dreamweaver already had a solid set of dynamically-based web dev features, and here Adobe was removing the ones we had all just started understanding and using? Unbelievable. I know many GoLive users continue to use that version (v6) to this day just because of those features.
Ach. I am heartened that they’re still working on a new version of GoLive. And I have hope that the ex-Macromedia crew who are now Adobe employees will not allow them to lose the pulse of the web, and keep this program on track with what web developers need.
If the Adobe people working on the Dreamweaver team can integrate it with the rest of the Creative Suite (e.g. GoLive’s smart objects features), and include the site management power features of GoLive, then I’ll be a
happymollified camper.I have talked with various folks at Adobe (including the GL product manager) and I’m quite confident that they will continue to do cool things with GoLive. I think that relegating it to a separate point product (instead of bundling it) is pretty sad, but it’s not surprising.
For those of you who are interested in the Acrobat 8 Professional part of this announcement, there are a couple of other good sources (besides the Adobe website).
The Adobe Acrobat User Community website has been updated included blogs about it by some Acrobat notables:
https://www.acrobatusers.com/
Also look at the Adobe Blogs posted today, notably the one from Lorie DeFurio, Acrobat evangelist:
https://blogs.adobe.com/
Yes, I’ve talked with them too. Maybe with the program as a stand alone product they’ll be able to innovate more, without being tied to the demands/schedule of the Creative Suite.
One thing that would greatly help would be if Adobe’s engineers could come up with a seamless “GoLive to Dreamweaver” conversion program that would convert GL’s actions to DW’s behaviors (how the built-in Javascript routines are handled by each program … one doesn’t translate to the other); GL’s templates to DW’s templates, and so on.
And if we surmise that GL will continue to have cool things, it would make sense for the conversion engine to work in the DW to GL direction, too.
Steve, oh yeah, Acrobat 8. ;-) Sorry, I’ll get over my “bitter ex-wife/PageMaker/Amiga user” feelings soon I’m sure… heh.
Love that acrobatusers.com site! The blogs there are wonderful, I’ve been following them since the site went live earlier this year.
InDesign users will be glad to learn that with Acrobat 8, the PDF forms you design in ID and add fields to in Acro can be set so that Reader users can save form data right in Reader! More info in this blog entry.
Another reason for the entrenchment of Dreamweaver: discount licensing. In 2000 or so we started including Dreamweaver on 6000 student laptops issued by the college I worked for at the time. Macromedia assigned us a rep. and said “we want the users; how much can you afford?” We started teaching regular web design classes with DW, and started writing plugins. Adobe wouldn’t return phone calls when we asked them to offer volume discounts on any of their products. 1500 students a year over 6 years adds up to a lot of people who couldn’t care less about InDesign.
I remember when Adobe purchased Macromedia… it was a shock, and as a web developer a worry.
Now the only Adobe products I use are Photoshop and Flash.
DreamWeaver, in my opinion, has become a bloated load of rubbish!-
1)It’s too big and heavy to be a quality code editor, even with it’s slew of features. (And that’s how the old MM team said they used DreamWeaver)
2)It’s still too clumsy (and slow) to use as a WYSYWIG.
3)And it still tries to write javascript for you which ends up as an inline atrocity against HTML! (Maybe if DW could guarantee well formed HTML it would use the DOM instead of inline event handlers)
4) in depth analysis –
https://mtcodex.net/archives/contemplating/the_danger_of_dreamweaver_part_1.php
Now, I was iniated into the world of web dev with DreamWeaver 4. But now a days, with a wealth of quality books around. I think it is both easier, cheaper and much more valuable to just learn how to write HTML / CSS and then JavaScript and a Server Side language than to learn to use DreamWeaver MX[extreme] 2000 Pro.
I think it’s just perceived to be more difficult, and maybe it does require a little bit more up front investment in terms of time, but it really pays!
I stopped using DW when I got a Mac and it ran too slow on it for comfort. It happened to be the best thing I ever did in terms of improving the quality of my sites and my personal ability (and hence marketability).
Mmm, that’s all very well, but will CS2.3 have universal binaries for us Intel Mac users?
Olly,
Acrobat 8 Pro is a universal binary. But the rest of CS2 is not. For that, you’ll need to wait for CS3 (Spring 07) as has been publicly stated by Adobe.
It really is too bad that Adobe never did a better job of promoting GoLive. It did have some advantages over Dreamweaver. I’m glad that Adobe isn’t dropping it entirely. I can dream for GoLive to morph into a smoothly integrated InDesign plugin that makes dual purposing of print files for the web seamless. That would make explicit the direction that Adobe seems to have been following for the last couple of GoLive versions.
Let Dreamweaver be the developer’s tool. GoLive’s short foray into database development was horribly implemented and I won’t miss it at all. As a print to web bridge, though, GoLive could be brilliant.
Adobe is still doing a horrible job of promoting GoLive. The company I work for has CS licenses, so we will be forced into more Dreamweaver use, and if that’s the case, we will have to find an extreme rationale to continue to order GoLive stand as a alone. Adobe isn’t communicating anything positve to their exisiting GoLive customers. And the communication we are getting is pretty much by inference.
I still use GoLive over DW any day, but this news is deeply depressing.
In the past I actually used to develop ColdFusion websites in GoLive with a free code plug-in and you know what it did a hell a lot better than DW did, and most of the CF developers avoided DW like the plague. So here’s hoping that that GoLive stays.
I have been using GoLive before Adobe purchased it, that’s how long I have been using it. Halleuah!!!
Um, how “official” is this? I just checked the Creative Suite page and not only is GoLive not gone, it’s now included in the Creative Suite Standard version. The premium version includes both GoLive *and* Dreamweaver according to the “Features” grid on the Creative Suite page.
Whoops. Mea culpa.
I just looked again, and I confused the columns in the features grid.
GoLive is *not* included in the Standard Suite. However it does list both Dreamweaver and GoLive as being part of the Premium Suite. Is this a ‘While supplies last’ sort of thing or what?
Good point JMill. Yes, I think it’s “while supplies last. ;) I think GoLive will likely still be included in the box until CS3. There’s no reason to take it out before then.
I do hope they can do something about the sheer bugginess of DW. When even basics like scrollbars and typing don’t always work correctly, you have to wonder about the quality control in the past. The only way is up….
Now, if flash would just follow suit. I think adobe should get this merge over with so license holders know where they stand. At least let people know what their plans are for all product integrations for Studio 8 and CS2/3. Way too much, control for a single company.
What a pain the interface of Dreamweaver is and absolute dog and mishmash to use. Ie frames how to edit a single cell in a table takes three clicks and trips to a menu GoLive just a click into the box and go. Things like MenuMachine wont work on Dreamweaver it creates brilliant menus with a few clicks.
The above comments I hope there is a seamless conversion for the actions in GL to Dreamweaver. I hope they fix the interface and the speed and the syntax checking which tries to fix legal custom java script.
[…] Turns out that two bits of information are coming out that weren’t quite clear at first. Acrobat 8 is noted as being Universal and that with the introduction of Dreamweaver 8, this marks the end of GoLive being bundled in the suite. But from all I see, GoLive is still included in CS2.3 along with Dreamweaver. I guess you can expect CS3 not to include GoLive anymore. […]
I bought CS2 Premium around when it first came out and love it. Then I wanted Dreamweaver and *bought* that. (Then it got packaged with CS2). So now to get Acrobat 8 will cost yet another $159? Okay… what *else* will get upgraded that I can spend $ on in the same package? Sheesh!
DW is a horrendous!! program, terrible terrible terrible!!
Right from the start, just defining the site!!!! goodness me, what a shambles of file management that is!
GoLive was beautiful (and still is).