Adobe to drop GoLive, Freehand

I have always felt Freehand was the better product? Why? Speed. I was able to creat graphics much faster with Freehand than with illustrator. I have used Freehand since version 4.0. The editable blends and easy to use paste inside features were great.

Illustrator now has many features that were Freehand-only for years, so they are coming around. However, I prefer the interface of Freehand with it's inspector palette much more than the myriad of palettes and/or dialogs. For example, the blend dialog... why isn't that a palette? And how come the tabs palette doesn't just automatically appear over block text? Weird stuff like that are a turn off...

Michael Bodily

More "popular" does not necessarily mean "better" in a software and user interface related matter.

I believe this decision was mainly made by Adobe's sales and marketing department. Short said, a software that is more popular will generate more sales for future releases.

If you analyze the background of the GoLive application, one will notice that the former GoLive Cyberstudio application was a Mac only application. This said, it is obvious that the market shares of GoLive are not equal to the ones of Dreamweaver. Obviously the Mac platform is by far not as popular as the +80%market shares of the Windows platform. Customers mainly stick to one application as soon as they get adapted to it. Dreamweaver has a typical non-Mac conform user interface. This is the main reason why Dreamweaver has become more popular on the Windows platform.

I am an absolute fan of Adobe GoLive an its pure, simple user friendly interface. This application has a lot of great features to offer and is the ideal tool for creating sophisticated and detailed layouts on the one hand and very simple page layouts on the other hand. Adobe GoLive actions and those of some third party developers are wonderful. Easy to use and edit for those who are not that much into JavaScript coding.

What will happen to third party Action devlelopers who have built their business on the pillars of the Adobe GoLive application? Will they simply get dumped by Adobe Incorporated?

What will happen to the majority of Adobe GoLive users who have used this web application in their daily business and private life for developing a huge collection of web site projects? For those users, this application has become a valuable tool to maintain, update and create existing and future site projects. This tool is by far more than just a site managment tool. For those users, GoLive has become the lifeblood for their daily business.

Adobe itself is not the end user. They will never realize the real value of an application. For those of us who have thousands of GoLive site files to handle for a vast number of customers and organizations, this tool simply builds the basis for our daily business.

Many GoLive users make use of components for example to extract site elements which are often used in a site project. Other GoLive users have applied a predefined set of JavaScript Actions into their site projects.

This said, the more important question is: What will happen if Adobe decides to silently abandon their standard web application tool?

Do we have no choice? Are we forced to destroy all of our efforts and hard work we have investigated into a website project?

We live in a very complicated hi-tech world. I believe a software company which pretends to be the market leader in developing worldwide standards publishing tools for print and web is not eligable to simply drop an application and leave their existing customers in a dead end road.

Adobe only causes frustration and anger if their developers should not manage to make a smart transition between GoLive and Dreamweaver and giving those of us the chance to import existing site projects into their new focused Web Editor. Otherwise, I fear that an "I don't care mentality" at Adobe could cause a real riot.


graphically & sincerely,

Marc Klein
Pixel:Industries

The real butth*le of this whole thing is that now there isn't any real competition. Why did Adobe need to purchase Macromedia? For Flash? Competition always forces innovation. Now what are we going to get from Adobe? Whatever they want, that's what.
It was cool having the two companies trying to out-do each other. We (the consumers) ended up with sweet products that we could choose from.

BTW - GoLive was the crotch of web developement software. Everybody knows that and that's why it got canned.

As a former GoLive user who very wisely came to his senses and started using Dreamweaver, I am VERY curious to understand the actual reasons why David Chartier thinks GL is "superior" to Dreamweaver.

A more outrageous and ignorant opinion I cannot think of (other than WinXP is superior to OS X)

David, care to elaborate on your opinion?

I just read this rumor was denied...


http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/index.cfm?NewsID=14810

"GoLive was Adobe's Dreamweaver (and a far superior product, might I add)"

To echo everyone else's statement, this is abundantly false.

You may LIKE the GUI more,
You may THINK it is prettier,
It may be EASIER to draw little picture boxes and add images to a web page,
But it is not a superior product to Dreamweaver.

Also read this please: Adobe denies dropping support and development of Freehand and Golive:
http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/05/31/adobe/index.php

And all Freehand fans, please sign the Freehand support page:
http://www.enrichdesign.com/freehand.html

GoLive has treated me great, I know a lot of people love Dreamweaver, but those people have to realise that making standard webpages (Like many of us do), GUI matters, and GoLive has been nice for me coming from InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop.
I'll take yur word on code and stuff though, I'm not a moron that's in love with my webapp, I just use it, and now Adobe tells me to use something else.
They did say that the GUI will be redone though, so they probably know that people like GoLive in that respect, which kinda tells me they're doing a best of both worlds here. So fanbois of Dreamweaver, don't be so lazy or blind that you don' welcome change in your app just becuase you've gotten used to something bad. If I can take the namechange and loosing my app, you guys should be able to deal with a new gui. :)

good! now get crackin on the Photoshop update for intel macs!!!!!!

Adobe made a great decision:

Dreamweaver vs. GoLive - Adobe knew Dreamweaver was better from the beginning. A basic, "if you can't beat 'em, eat 'em" treatment.

Freehand vs. Illustrator - Whoever thinks Adobe is going to completely give up 15 years of development of Illustrator is crazy. Though I'm sure we'll see plenty of Freehand features incorporated into Illustrator CS3.

As for GoLive - don't let the door hit you in the butt. I can't believe I wasted 6 months trying to learn that crap thinking it might just be better than Dreamweaver...