Review: Adobe GoLive CS2
- Article 38 of 53
- iCreate, August 2005
Fans say Adobe GoLive is better than Dreamweaver, yet few web designers use it. What does the CS2 version have that can challenge this hegemony?
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The usual GoLive stability concerns also apply. GoLive no longer crashes every two minutes as it did way back in its CyberStudio days and it’s more stable still than GoLive CS. But it does have a marked tendency to freeze if things go slightly pear-shaped on the server side: a simple drag and drop upload from your desktop to the server window is usually enough to bring GoLive to its knees, for instance. Given Adobe’s usual bug-fixing schedule for GoLive, don’t expect these problems to disappear until, well, GoLive CS3.
Our biggest gripe? The interface. Ever since version four of GoLive, Adobe has been progressively mutating the original user-friendly CyberStudio interface to match its own vision of how computer interfaces should behave. In other words, most of GoLive’s palettes serve only to make your life harder rather than easier. That’s not to say they’re as bad as the abomination that is the Dreamweaver “it’s like Windows, but it’s for a Mac!” interface, but it’ll take you some time to work out where everything is, since it’s usually concealed, stuck in a sub-sub-menu, embedded at the bottom of a dialogue box, or stuck in the third tabbed sub-palette of an invisible palette. Despite this, GoLive remains by far the most Mac-like in its behaviour compared with other web page design programs.
GoLive CS2’s price is steep, although the upgrade price is pretty reasonable as is its price when part of the CS2 suite. If you’re going to be doing pro web-work on a Mac, however, and know dynamic coding yourself, then GoLive is easily the best choice on the market for you. That recommendation is doubled if you’re going to be doing mobile development.
While there are some obvious worries that GoLive is either going to disappear or be merged into some ghastly chimera with Dreamweaver, the likelihood is that there’s life in GoLive yet and that an investment in GoLive CS2 isn’t going to be throwing cash down the drain. If it does disappear, there’s already enough interoperability between Dreamweaver and GoLive to avoid total disaster, and there are plenty of people still on GoLive 5 and 6.
If all you know is Dreamweaver and you’re a web designer, give GoLive a try: you may find your life just that little bit more Mac-like and a little bit better.
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