Review: Adobe GoLive CS2
Editor: Adobe GoLive CS2
Version: 8.0.1
Developer: Adobe
Platform/OS: Windows/Mac
WYSIWYG: Yes
Price: $399 USD
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+Bfor 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.
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