After the aquistion of Macromedia, people really questioned the future of certain products like Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Freehand. As far as the latter goes, Adobe did officially announce the end of the line for new Freehand versions. Adobe will continue to sell Freehand MX to those customers that need it. Adobe also promised that we would see a new version of GoLive. GoLive 9 is here. The difference (in policy/behavior) is that GoLive was/is an active product before the aqusition. Macromedia had already stopped development of Freehand before being aquired by Adobe. That’s why it never saw a Studio 8 upgrade.
Why two products?
That’s Simple. There are two types of customers that do web design/development. Dreamweaver CS3 is aimed at the code savvy developer high-end of the market. It is the industry leader in this space and that’s why it’s included in CS3. GoLive 9 is aimed at both code-savvy web professionals and non-coding graphic designers who need to create sophisticated, CSS-based content in an intuitive visual environment. I for one am happy about this (as I most closely fit the GoLive customer model). While I intend to continue getting up to speed on Dreamweaver CS3, all of my existing sites are in GoLive. So therefore it much easier to maintain them in a workflow and tool that I’m used to. GoLive 9 is also a universal binary and therefore runs faster on my intel based Macs. Yes, it runs on Vista too.
Can you switch over to Dreamweaver CS3?
Absolutely! If you want to move from GoLive to Dreamweaver, you can. It’s included in many of the CS3 suites. Also Adam Pratt and Lynn Grillo (GoLive gurus) have created an Adobe GoLive to Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Migration Guide. There is also a GL2DW Site Migration Extension.
What if I want to stay with GoLive for now, what are my upgrade options?
The upgrade to GoLive 9 is $169 from GL 6, CS, CS2, or Creative Suite CS Premium or Creative Suite CS2 Premium. Education price on GoLive 9 is $79.
Will Adobe keep making GoLive forever?
Whether we see a version 10 of GoLive or not is quite honestly up to the customer base. If GoLive 9 is a hit, then Adobe will likely pay attention to that success.
What are the new features in GoLive 9?
Best to head over to the Adobe site and check them out there. You can also download a trial version and take it for a spin.
Hey Terry,
I like this idea of keeping GoLive. I like it alot. But why on earth did Adobe not include it in the CS3 suite?