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Provides: Artistic creative development of digital, paper, and web based media
Developer: Adobe Systems, Inc.
Requirements: Mac OS X v10.2.8 or greater
Premium Retail Price: New: $1,199, upgrade from CS1: $549, upgrade to full Suite from Photoshop: $749, upgrade from CS1.3 (this is CS1 with the recently released Acrobat 7): $449
Standard Retail Price: New: $899, upgrade from CS1: $349, upgrade to Standard Suite from Photoshop $499
Version Reviewed: Beta

In my ongoing journey through the entire suite, I am presenting as many of the features that I can properly present. This presentation details Adobe GoLive.

• Bridge Review (w/ Adobe Stock Photos & Help Center)
• Photoshop (& ImageReady) review
• Camera Raw (in the works)
• Illustrator review
• GoLive review
• InDesign (in the works)
• Acrobat review (in the works)

CS2 GoLive

Standard Price: $399, upgrade from any earlier licensed version of GoLive ($169). [No discount to upgrade from GoLive to either suite program as that can only be done from Photoshop.]

I like to think of GoLive as the "Mac" of web design programs. Those who use it love it, swear by it, live it, and yet it's Dreamweaver (read "PCs") that has the majority market share. Now that the purchase of MacroMedia by Adobe has gone through, the full future of either program is truly known by very few people. Regardless, the full result of this will be years in the future (really) and GoLive CS2 is here to use now.

Most of the improvements to most of the programs in the rest of the Creative Suite have included a number of big crowd pleasers that cause viewers to go "Ooohhh" and "Ahhhh." Most of the big changes that have transpired within GoLive have been those that are most likely to appeal to the web-geek. CSS has been vastly improved throughout. In fact, a number of the ways that in the past GoLive used to utilize html to accomplish long standing GoLive tasks and even some basic html operations have been replaced with a CSS approach (code) to do the same thing.

[For those who's web development tasks have only recently started, CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. CSS provides incredible control on what can be placed on the web and assist maintaining a consistency across platforms and programs that cannot be achieved through straight html. In addition, when properly implemented, it allows the content to be separate from the layout, and one can easily change layout without effecting the content. For an excellent description of CSS and its various advantages, see Zen Garden, the Beauty of CSS Design.]

The basics of GoLive remain: the tight site database management providing full control on all links and uploads, the point and shoot for link creation, the easy video integration, and the automatic actions and rollovers that make complicated web site and page design easy.

[For those of you who've tried to work with GoLive in the past feeling very very frustrated, let me present the one issue that makes or breaks GoLive: all activities must take place within a GoLive site. That is, if you have an image on your desktop and drag it into a page, all "appears" to be fine, but it is not. For GoLive to do its thing, you must first drag the image into a GoLive site and then drag the image into a web page. The reason for this is GoLive doesn't really know anything about your computer and/or your hard drive. All it really knows about is what takes place inside a GoLive site. Thus, once you drag the image into the site, GoLive has the image (or file) in its database (for that site). Once the image is "in" the site, any links to that image are then known to GoLive. That means that if you change the name of an image (e.g., "myphoto.jpg" to "yourphoto.jpg," every link that contained "myphoto.jpg" will be changed in the html code on every affected page to "yourphoto.jpg." This internal cross-checking of all links provides complete site-management capability. Also, because GoLive "knows" all of the changes made. When you go to upload the changes, all it takes is a single click to upload changed pages and every page that was changed since the last upload will now be uploaded.

When you drag an image into a GoLive site, the image is copied. Thus, you can move, delete, or do whatever you want with the original on your computer. The copied image in the site is contained within a folder called "web-content" in the folder containing the site. Because everything in the site's folder is complete, you can easily drag the entire site onto a flash/USB drive and take it to another computer to continue working on the site with no fears you do not have all the files.]

CSS has been around for quite some time, and is not new to this version of GoLive, let alone the web. However, what has taken place in GL CS2 is that even when you are writing in standard html, you will be taking advantages of CSS. For example, if you want to make a word bold, in html you'd write <b>bold</b>. Now, when you click on the bolder font icon in the Main Toolbar, you get <strong>bold</strong>. To the web viewer, such a change is probably not going to be even noticed. However, to the website designer who creates the site using CSS, it means that he/she can now click on the bold type icon on the toolbar and not have to later convert the <b> to <strong>. This is because "<strong>" means something in CSS and the html "<b>" doesn't mean a thing in CSS.

If you've looked at the Toolbar in any previous version of GoLive, you can see the difference in that all styles are changed to being displayed with a simple "T" and display styles via making the style of the T as "Bold," "Italic," and "Teletype."

A different, and perhaps more powerful example might be GoLive's unique grid option. Ever since GoLive first appeared (and by that I mean ever since it was CyberStudio created by a company called GoLive), the program has had a grid option whereupon you could drag images, text fields, etc. onto this grid and obtain pixel precision placement of objects on your web page. Behind the scenes, what GoLive was doing was placing a table onto the page that had an infinite possible number of variations as to how it was cut and/or chopped up. While this proved to be incredibly creative and variable, it also led to some lengthy code sections and gave GoLive a reputation for unnecessarily long code in their pages. Now, when you drag a grid onto a web page, it's all CSS. One of the big big advantages of CSS over regular html is that it is a much more efficient way of describing object on a web page. So now when you drag a grid onto a page, the resultant code is significantly shorter than it used to be.

To be very specific, in GoLive CS1, I pulled out a grid, placed an image block and a text block. The final code for this simple grid was 106 words. I did the same thing in GoLive CS2 and the CSS grid using only 16 words. What this means to you is that (in this example) your web pages would load up to 85% faster (for that section of the page) because fewer words would have to be parsed by the browser to build the same web page.

The image below shows GL CS1 on the left and CS2 on the right with a similar grid with an empty photo block and a text block placed on the grid. The window is set to GoLive's split page to show the layout on top and the code on the bottom half. It's quite evident how much more efficient CSS is to create a page of instructions. Thus, you can now do a variety of basic CSS placement of items without (your) setting up any CSS code.

One of the more noticeable changes you'll see when you first start GoLive is the Tools Palette. Now it is divided into two parts, the top half provides tools that one interacts with the items on a web page during the page's creation and the bottom half with GoLive's long standing auto-coding tools that the user drags onto a page to create the various parts of a web page. Specifically, clockwise from the top left the various tools are:

• A cursor to place text
• An object selection tool
• An eye dropper to sample colors
• A magnifying glass to zoom into a page
• A hand to move a page around, and
• A Layer Tool, or a Grid Text Box Tool to add Text Boxes in specific places of specific sizes. (See below for more information on these)

I suppose to maintain continuity with other Adobe applications, the Magnifying glass lets you zoom up to 1600X into your page. While you are not likely to ever need/use this level of magnification, if you have one of those 1 pixel gifs for aligning images, you can easily go in and grab it. [However, if you are using CSS, you will not need the 1 pixel gifs.]

Most of the tools on the Tool palette are pretty much the same, with three new ones: on the bottom is the TypePad Blog tool set, two up is the Sixapart Movable Type tool set, and third from the top is the CSS tool set.

Adobe does an astonishingly bad job of explaining how to use both the TypePad Blog set and the Movable Type set of tools. In fact, they say nothing in the Help file and on the PDF manual. The only place I could find anything of support for either (actually both) was in this one Adobe Techdoc on Movable Type.

The new CSS block is however, quite revolutionary, and for those who've been wanting to dive into CSS but wanted some guiding hands, this is it.

To better explain each CSS block, moving from left-to-right and top-to-bottom: Three Columns: Scaling Center Two Columns: Fixed Left Navigational Rows Padded Box Two Columns: Fixed Right Three Liquid Columns Two Liquid Columns

You use the CSS blocks like just about everything else found in the Tool palette, you drag the item into your page. One of the first things you should do after adding a CSS block to a page but before anything else is to rename the items in the CSS Editor (the "staircase" icon in the "Properties" icons on the upper right on every page and also found on the Tool Bar to the right of the text alignment options). For each icon there is a component for each part plus a container. Thus, for the "Two Columns: Fixed Left" (a good one to use for menus on the left hand side of the page), there would be three classes that you should rename into something that would mean something to you. As it is, the container is called ".navboxcont_BFC30EEF," the left part is called ".navboxleft_BFC30EEF," and the right part is called ".navboxauto_BFC30EEF." In each of these, the very end of the name is unique code in case you do not rename the object—this will be different on each object you drag in. However, you are best to rename each part to something that makes sense to you and relevant to the site.

You can also place these CSS styles inside one another to create variations for any given layout. Be forewarned: this may seem like working with Tables, but it's not. You cannot simply drag sizes around and add, subtract, and merge cells as one would with Tables. With CSS, you have different powers and strengths. You soon will find tremendous powers when working in the CSS Editor. If you have been working for years with Tables and are ready to move onto CSS, my best recommendation is to plan on taking a block of time and working with creating basic forms and manipulating them into all the new cool things that only CSS can properly provide. In the long run, you will be better off. It is not a good idea to go into using CSS for the first time when you have a time deadline; learn first, charge later.

For improved integration with the rest of the Creative Suite (2), you can now share swatch collections. Thus, if you are creating a site with specific colors and want to work with the same colors in Photoshop (or visa versa), any saved swatches will show up in both programs.

One of the changes that may confuse past users of GoLive is what happens when you click Command-n for a new page. Instead of simply seeing a new page open on your desktop, you are presented with a variety of wizard options.

Two sample selections might be that for a new page (note you need to click on the "Web" tab):

As seen in the above example, not only can you simply select a sample page, but you can select from a variety of pre-made sample pages of varying designs and types. A sample page is also provided along with a description and various doctype/encoding options.

Or, for a site (here, you logically click on the "Site" tab):

Here, you can create a new site from scratch or from a previous site, or you can create a new site from a sample site. Note the option to select Web Sample, Mobile Samples, Scripting Samples, and other samples. Each of these will have a variety of pre-made pages and sites for easy adoption to your needs or your examination.

Using a template page and/or site from GoLive has two benefits: first, the beginner can create interesting designs and/or construction simply by using what is provided. Second, it allows the beginner and/or intermediate web designer to conduct a site or page "autopsy" to see how the page was created. I've long been a fan of learning on the work of others, and this is a great way to examine well made pages. Beginners are cautioned, though, that if they use a page that is too complex, they may be in over their head if something in the page breaks. In addition, if any given page is really good, people surfing the net may find that same page showing up in a variety of sites all over the place.

Also enhanced in this version is the ability to author for mobile devices. You can view SVG-t content in split-view. You can see source, XML, outline, and art tree views. There is also a button to bring up SSR (Small Screen Rendering) so you can see what your site would look like on a small screen. (I'm not going to elaborate on this as I've not utilized these features and abilities so I cannot speak from experience.)

As mentioned earlier, amongst the tools in the Tool Palette is the Layer Tool and Grid Text Box Tool. This is the only paired tool in GoLive's Tool Palette. They are very similar, but used very differently.

With the Layer Tool, you can click on the tool, mouse down anywhere on a page (I do mean anywhere) and a text box can be dragged out to the size and location you drag. Once you finish creating the box, a complete div will have been created with full height and width as well as X and Y location attributes (you will have to set any "Z" location by yourself). [The small yellow square in the 3rd image is a "div" placeholder on a page. It doesn't show up when the page is rendered in a browser.]

The curious thing is that if you have dragged a grid onto the page, this tool doesn't do anything. However, if you select the Grid Text Box Tool, you can drag out text boxes on the Grid. Now, both of these are different from the Layout Text Box seen in the image above (below the magnifying glass and below the small blue square, right hand side). The Layout Text Box, like the Grid Text Box Tool, can also only be used with the Grid, but when dragged onto a grid only comes out in one small size. After placing on the Grid, you resize the text box as needed. In my opinion, with the Grid Text Box Tool, the Layout Text Box becomes irrelevant and should have been dropped.

Among the "where have they been" features, GoLive now has SFTP and WebDAV via SSH (or SSL).

Two other new features that should appeal to some include the fact that now when you close a site window, you are asked if you want to close the site window. While this may seem annoying, it's a big benefit in OS X. The upper left hand side of a site window looks exactly like any GoLive window and any other window in OS X. Thus, if you close a window not realizing that it's a site window, you will then have to re-open the site window (all work within a GoLive site must be done in the site window). If you have very large sites with hundreds of pages and hundreds of associated files, it can take some time to open a site. Thus, this insures you do not accidently close a site before you are done with the site.

Another cool feature in GoLive CS2 is that you can work in Version Cue or in Photoshop and chose to save a file directly into a site file. In the past, you'd have to "Refresh" the site so that GoLive would recognize that something was added to the site at the Finder level. (Remember, in the beginning of this review I commented upon how the user must add files to GoLive for GoLive to recognize that a file has been added. Now, in the Preferences, you can select an option for GoLive to self-scan, allowing you to save directly from Photoshop into a site file, by the time you move from Photoshop to GoLive, the file you just saved there is ready and waiting for you to use.

Lastly, a feature that may not seem like much but does help provide a great "touch" to a website, is the easy creation of favicons. Those are those little images now very common in the address bar in browsers. [Look at the small green "A" in the dark blue square in the URL field of whatever browser you are using.] Admittedly, the hardest aspect of favicons is trying to take whatever icon you have and convert it down to something that looks like anything in a 16 x 16 pixel pattern. However, once you've created your icon, GoLive can now process the icon into a favicon in a few easy steps.

To do this, you create your icon within the (dreadfully small) 16 x 16 pixel limit and save it in either a Photoshop or Illustrator format. You move this item into the SmartObjects folder in the Extras tab. Now, from the Site menu, select Smart Objects -> Create Smart Favorite Icon, and the following window appears:

At this point, you can set how much information your favicon will have and you can even have layers (although I'm not fully certain what advantages they could provide). Notice also that you can save each favicon in a variety of formats—this is best because some browsers will select the best of the bunch (while others select the first format they come to).

While this update to GoLive has limited "Ooooh" and "Aaaah" features for the web designer who's staying with html code, there is much for the designer who is moving into CSS. For designers who are already using CSS, the new features in GoLive will both save them time and alleviate aggravation while providing new options. Sadly, the biggest negative are the sudden quits of the program for no, or little, cause. Obviously, this is a biggy and hopefully a repair update will solve or deal with this issue. Regrettably, I cannot point to any specific action or cause to these quits, only that any action can initiate them. On the (semi) bright side, there are many users who report no problems whatsoever, so at this point in time it is unknown what or where the problem is. Rule of thumb; save early and save often.

In short, this update shows a slow steady growth of GoLive. It continues taking full advantage of its site management strengths while allowing easy page development that is robust on the vast majority of platforms and browsers. Try doing that with Dreamweaver (or a PC).

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.