Adobe GoLive CS2 focused heavily on innovating the development for the mobile market and in the development of CSS Web sites. The release did not, however, reinstate any of the dynamic content tools that were taken out of the application in the previous version.
The GoLive team decided to focus on mobile development after looking at market data and the growth that market shows in the next few years. For example, mobile services is expected to grow to US$115 billion by 2008; the current 1.3 billion mobile users is expected to grow by 175-200 million users a year; and even the smallest of mobile services, like ringtones, is a $4 billion a year business.
As the mobile market continues to grow worldwide, Adobe believes they are in a unique position to deliver content for those devices. GoLive’s mobile authoring tools are based on open standards to support mobile layout (CSS, XHTML), multimedia and interactivity (SVG, SVG-T), and video (3GPP, MPEG-4) for mobile devices.
GoLive also includes device emulation for previewing content for Sony Ericsson and Nokia devices—it is extensible to support other manufacturer handsets, as well.
Dynamic content
The ability to easily build Web sites with dynamic content is still missing from the latest release of GoLive. Adobe said that while it was a hard decision they are relying on the third-party developers to pick up that development.
“We did that because we wanted to make the dynamic content solution more extensible,” GoLive Product Manager, Devin Fernandez, told MacCentral. “It was a tough thing to do, but we are hoping to rely on third parties to create dynamic content solutions. As the product manager, I am looking very closely at these solutions.”
Fernandez pointed out that it is still possible to include PHP and MySQL code into documents authored with GoLive, there is just no graphical user interface to help manage the process. While they didn’t rule out the return of dynamic content tools in future releases, Adobe said it would have to be done differently than what users see today.
“These are exactly the things that I’m looking at,” said Fernandez. “I do not want to address dynamic content in the same way that Dreamweaver does, because it still forces you to know PHP and MySQL.”
Changes in GoLive have made authoring Web pages relatively easy. For the Creative Suite customer that’s what needs to be done to integrate the package in the best way for those people. The long time GoLive users, however, are making their feelings known to Adobe.
“Our focus is on the Creative Suite user—the average Creative Suite user doesn’t even know that dynamic content is gone,” said Fernandez. “From our hardcore GoLive users, there is certainly some backlash—they feel somewhat abandoned.”
CSS development
One of the other big changes with GoLive was the enhancement of visual CSS to build Web pages. Adobe also included tags from Movable Type, a popular blogging tool to make building those Web sites even easier.
With Visual CSS Authoring, Golive enables users to drag and drop prebuilt, extensible CSS block objects onto Web pages to build liquid CSS designs. In addition, the new Layer and Grid Text Box tools enable designers to place and size CSS-based layers and text boxes, while the enhanced Layout Grid, Layout Text Box, and Layer objects all produce CSS by default.
Other CSS enhancements include an improved CSS Editor, which enables you to view the source code and check syntax as you edit CSS style sheets; automatic conversion of HTML styles to CSS styles; a default CSS stylesheet to apply to all new files created; and easier CSS site management with new support for tracking and modifying CSS usage globally through the Site Management window and the In & Out Links palette.