HTML Editor Reviews | Reviews and Discussion of (X)HTML Coding Tools

Review: Adobe GoLive CS2

I’d never really given Adobe GoLive much thought. Sure, it came bundled with CS2, but I already had a couple editors to choose from. On paper, GoLive CS2 is an amazing-looking product, full of great features. In practice, however, the program falls a bit short. To be fair, I’m not exactly GoLive’s target market — I prefer hand-coding to WYSIWYG editing. At the same time, the product could offer more of a balance (the way Dreamweaver does) between visual editing and source editing.

What I Like

• Responsive code hinting and code completion for HTML/CSS/PHP.
• Integration with other CS2 products.
• Easily changeable syntax color themes.
• SSR (small screen rendering) preview of your pages, so you have some idea of what they might look like on PDAs or cell phones.
• If you create a site, the Project overview shows you a visual list of all colours in your CSS file.
• You can create site diagrams within GoLive (I prefer OmniGraffle for this, but a neat feature nonetheless).
• If you double-click just to the left of a closing tag (in source view), the editor will highlight everything between the opening and closing tags — nice for matching opening and closing divs.
• File comparison and versioning support.

Gripes

• It’s resource hungry. GoLive gives Dreamweaver a run for its money — just turning it on uses about 100MB or RAM on my machine.
• The interface. I don’t mind palettes in Photoshop, but I hate them in GoLive. The GUI feels cluttered and messy, probably because I use GoLive in Source view rather than Layout view. Give me panels and tabs any day.
• Some standard keyboard shortcuts don’t work, like CTRL+B for bolding text.
• It’s expensive. For what it would cost to purchase GoLive on its own, I could buy copies of WeBuilder, TopStyle, TextMate, and skEdit — four superior programs — and still have at least $200 left over.

Wishlist

GoLive isn’t short on features; in fact, it has an abundance of functionality. Where GoLive is lacking, however, is in its presentation of said functionality. GoLive is set up to look and feel like the other CS products, which doesn’t work for the web — or at least not for web editing. Give the program panels instead of palettes, as well as a tabbed, multi-document interface and even better source editing support (like 99.736435% of the editors out there) and you’ll have a better overall product.

Overall

I don’t really know what the future holds for GoLive now that Adobe owns Dreamweaver. In a perfect world, they’ll meld the best parts of each together (CS-DW integration!) and scrap the extraneous bits. Who knows? Right now, however, if you have a copy of GoLive because it came bundled with CS2 and you don’t want to purchase another HTML editor, you could definitely do worse than use GoLive to create your sites. Yet, I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to purchase it on its own.

11 Comments

1. Have you ever considered about including a little bit more than just your articles? I mean, what you say is valuable and all. Nevertheless think about if you added some great visuals or videos to give your posts more, “pop”! Your content is excellent but with images and clips, this website could certainly be one of the greatest in its niche. Excellent blog!

   Comment by call of duty 4 modern warfare 3 — November 14, 2011 @ 12:24 am

2. You may or may not find this information directly relevent to the topic at hand but all readers could greatly benefit. No matter what you’ve tried in the past, you’ve got to check out Make Money with Kindlin at http://makemoneywithkindlin.com for the very best tools for making money online.

   Comment by josh — November 16, 2011 @ 12:28 am

3. Thank you, I have recently been searching for information approximately this topic for a long time and yours is the greatest I’ve found out till now. However, what about the bottom line? Are you sure about the source?

   Comment by UGG Foxfur Boots — November 17, 2011 @ 2:56 pm

4. I’ve said that least 4073923 times. The problem this like that is they are just too compilcated for the average bird, if you know what I mean

   Comment by a4073923 — November 18, 2011 @ 8:45 pm

5. Thanks a ton for sharing your opinions. Being blogger, I am continually searching for fresh and different tips on how to think about a issue. I find good inspiration in doing this. Thanks a ton again

   Comment by Malik — November 18, 2011 @ 11:58 pm

6. My spouse and i have been really thankful that Louis managed to do his homework because of the precious recommendations he got out of your web site. It is now and again perplexing to just continually be giving freely guides that people today may have been making money from. And we also understand we now have the blog owner to appreciate because of that. All of the illustrations you have made, the simple blog menu, the relationships you can aid to foster – it’s got many spectacular, and it’s helping our son and our family believe that this idea is satisfying, and that’s particularly fundamental. Many thanks for everything!

   Comment by vrbo — November 19, 2011 @ 2:14 am

7. I don’t normally comment but I gotta say thank you for the post on this one :D.

   Comment by laptop sales — November 19, 2011 @ 3:10 am

8. Aw, this was a very nice post. In thought I would like to put in writing like this additionally – taking time and precise effort to make a very good article… but what can I say… I procrastinate alot and by no means seem to get something done.

   Comment by www.intersuits.co.uk — November 19, 2011 @ 5:00 am

9. I precisely desired to appreciate you once more. I’m not certain the things that I might have followed without these recommendations shared by you relating to such a theme. It was before the challenging dilemma in my position, however , witnessing a new professional tactic you processed that forced me to leap with happiness. I am happy for this service and even sincerely hope you are aware of a powerful job you are always accomplishing educating many others through the use of your websites. Most likely you have never encountered all of us.

   Comment by outsource — November 19, 2011 @ 5:21 am

10. I want to voice my passion for your kind-heartedness giving support to persons that need help on in this theme. Your special commitment to passing the solution across had become exceedingly informative and have really helped employees just like me to arrive at their ambitions. Your entire useful guidelines implies a great deal a person like me and a whole lot more to my colleagues. Many thanks; from everyone of us.

    Comment by cannondale road bikes — November 19, 2011 @ 6:09 am

11. Of course, what a great site and informative posts, I will add backlink – bookmark this site? Regards, Reader

    Comment by StephenMendoza — November 19, 2011 @ 7:36 am

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.