Adobe GoLive

Adobe's GoLive

GoLive will become Orange Crystal Consulting's IDE (Integrated Development Environment) of choice. Up until now our shop has been using the Macromedia MX suite. Although this has been adequate for our needs until now, it was decided that it is time to ramp up our tools to something state-of-the-art. Besides that, our clients need us to know it!

Although no formal survey has been done it appears from our experience that Adobe's Photoshop is in more widespread use than Macromedia's Fireworks. In our shop we have been using Fireworks for years and we have enjoyed the nice user interface and the many cool features such as the export wizard. Furthermore, the on-board sampling technology seems to be without peer.

It has been fascinating to see the way these two companies have strived for 'integrated environments'. Each environment strives to give its own suite the ability to edit graphics during a web page editting session. This of course harkens back to the Microsoft's DDE and OLE technologies. We were impressed with GoLive's SmartObjects technology. Although the Macromedia suite keeps track of the 'source' of a graphic, we liked with the way Adobe publishes metadata and allows us to keep track of everything through the Bridge.

Extremely cool is something called rollover detection. The rollover detection engine is able to 'detect' a rollover image based on its name. Naming conventions can be chosen and even custom-built. Another cool feature is the ability to 'flatten' Javascript. What this means is that Javascript which is never used is never loaded written to source code.

Adobe's emphasis on mobile devices is quite forward-looking. We look forward to getting into the details of the new mobile specifications. GoLive definitely has a sharp IDE for developing the mobile end.

GoLive's templates, components and snippets will allow us to work with great speed and stay competitive. One of the problems of maintaining a large site is having to change multiple pages to update some content. It appears that GoLive has solved this problem through the use of what they term components. The concept of templates, components and snippets is very clear and each feature has its place. We like the way pages based on templates are divided up into edittable and non-edittable regions, thus protecting pages from inadvertant changes which could cause unwanted side-effects (inconsistency being the primary one). A component is a reusable piece of code that can be placed onto many pages. When you update the component all of the pages which contain the component are updated.

Flyout and contextual menus provide a boatload of feature functionality. The use of context-sensitive inspectors are also convenient, especially the way they are dockable. This reminds us that you can also customize your workspace anyway you want. Workspaces are nothing new, but this is a nice feature considering the complexity of the environment.

Orange Crystal Consulting knows the values of keeping up with the latest technology. This is one reason we have puchased the latest, greatest Adobe Creative Suite CS2. From the point of view of collaboration with artists, content writers, and clients this suite of products will give us the best bang for our buck. It has tools that let you share your website as a PDF. This seems to be a much better approach than having your client navigate to some strange test page.