A Sneak Peek at Adobe GoLive 5

by Gary Coyne

Adobe purchased the company GoLive (who made a program called CyberStudio) while Cyberstudio 3.5 was in beta. By the time they finished, the program, now called Adobe GoLive, was called version 4. The major change that Adobe had created was of a Windows version of the product, but despite the amount of improvements made to the Mac version, it was questionable to many for a full digit increase in version number. Having taken a long hard look at GoLive 5, Adobe could call this new version "6" and no one would question the increase. So many of the long standing wish lists are being addressed in the new version, and so many new wonderful features that never appeared on any wish list, that this upgrade is like Christmas and Chanukah all over again.

Adobe chose to preview the new version 5 at the Spring Internet World 2000 held at the Los Angeles Convention Center (April 5-7) (despite the fact that the program is not even in beta) because they felt to show only version 4.0.1 with version 5 so close would have been a disservice. Fortunately, version 5 was reasonably well behaved with a few quits, and very seldom required a full restart of the computer. For alphaware*, that's very good.

[Normally I do not review beta software let alone alpha software. So please consider this an article, not a review. The features cited here seemed to work fine. There are many other features that cannot yet be reported on, but seem to be as exciting as the features mentioned below. We must now wait until June and then give the program a proper trial review.]

Probably the greatest improvement to GoLive is now the program will not chew up, or re-parse, source code. This means you can invent silly tags that have no meaning, specific ASP code, or any type of code and GoLive will not do anything to the page. Working with code has been significantly improved in many ways with what Adobe is calling Dynamic Link. Using Dynamic Link brings a new window to the program that allows one to look at source code and the layout window simultaneously. With what Adobe is calling "360° Code," you can make a change in the source code and watch a concurrent change in the Layout Window and vice versa. Also, if you make text active (black) in either, you can see the same become active in the other window. In addition, you can save any snippit of code you create to use in any other site. This feature provides "drag and drop" code.

The other major improvement is a new "Save for Web..." selection in the File Menu. The best way to explain this is by example. Someone gives you a Photoshop file. You do not need Photoshop on your computer. You place a Save for Web icon from the Pallet onto your page and select Save for the Web. You then get the same window that you would see from either Photoshop or Imageready that lets you optimize the image and lets you save into your site file. In addition, if you wish to change the size of the drawing or crop the drawing, GoLive goes back to the original psd file from which to make the changes so you never make a compressed jpeg from a compressed jpeg (or gif or whatever).

In all, there are seven "Applications within Applications" in GoLive where Dynamic Link (360° code) and Save for Web are only two. The other five include a full QuickTime Editor (enhanced from version 4) which now also lets you control streaming video, Flash, Shockwave, Real, and sound files at part of a QuickTime presentation. There is also a Java Script Editor (enhanced from version 4), and a full Java Script Debugger.

GoLive also has a Site Reporter which provides on-screen and printable reports (or "finds") on a wide variety of site issues. For example, one can find "all the pages that require more than 3 clicks to get to." Or find all the pages still have the "Welcome to Adobe GoLive" as the name of the document, or are over [sig.] 40k, or those made in the last several days, etc.

Finally there is the Site Designer. The Site Designer provides "Visio," or a white board area where one can play around with a general view of the current site and/or a proposed site. One can lay out pages, links, superstructures of how you would like a site to be designed and when you finish, all the pages and links are there waiting for you to add content and the formal link components.

Another major improvement is that the site file is now completely cross platform.

Among the many new features of GoLive 5 include the ability to bring a full Photoshop image as a greyed-out background working structure to make your general page layout. You can pull up css floating windows over selected bits of the image. Then you can use the crop tool to select parts of that original image, and they will be placed in the floating boxes from which you can then "Save for the Web" as an optimized portion of the original image.

All tool windows are now "Adobeized." That is, you have the standard tear away menu tabs so you can mix and match how you layout your windows. As opposed to other Adobe products, GoLive's Control-clicking on a window bar causes the window's tab to cling to the right-most edge of the screen. The program itself is fully customizable so you can even create new menus as you see fit as well as create your own keyboard commands for menu selections.

The manner in which GoLive stores a web site's data has been completely rewritten so that if you have a site of over 1000 pages, only the pages that are currently being worked on are active in the program. Thus, a 10,000 page site should respond just as fast as a 100 page site.

Elsewhere in the program, the Table Inspector provides full control on setting up tables. It also shows all the cells within a table even if they cannot be seen in the Layout mode's window. For example, if you have a table that is 30 rows long and you can only see 15 of them, you will be able to see all 30 in the inspector and select all the cells you wish to select for customizing. Sorting in rows or columns can now be performed in ascending or descending order.

GoLive now supports Styles so one can create styles for tables or text or whatever, and using the eyedropper, one can suck the style from one item and it will be utilized in another. Text boxes placed in grids can be locked so if you enter too much text into a text box, it will flow outside the text box and not distort or change the size of the grid. Contextual menus have been considerably enhanced.

There is more, but this is mostly what was presented at the Spring Internet Show. The bad news is that this will not be ready until around June. Until then, hang in there.

Alphaware

When software is in development, it is called alphaware. During this time, it is an open pallet of parts where programmers are still adding features and tweaking the interface. Once the features and interface are established, the software is called betaware. At this stage it is sent to a group of testers who have the responsibility to work with the software and note its problems by sending in reports to the programmers. Only by testing the program in a wide variety of environments on many systems can one hope to resolve as many of the bugs and problems found in any program before its public release. Once the programmers have resolved all the problems that have been found, it is released to the public who (in reality) become the final beta testers. This is why there are so many X.0.1+ programs in the world.

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February 07, 2012