Okay, so they are "phasing out" FreeHand & GoLive. Does that mean each product will cease to exist, or are they to be sold off (like when Adobe acquired FH when they purchased Aldus, then sold FH to Macromedia and kept PageMaker)?

I'm an Illustrator user, and at least so far, Adobe has shown me they will keep innovating regardless of the fact theat there may be no real competition in the market. (Photoshop being a prime example.) They realize that they need to sell upgrades to their own existing wares... but even still, I think the presence of FreeHand in the market is good for everyone. (CorelDRAW! is there, but they are in such a niche market that it's tough for me to really consider that product a competitor to Illustrator across the board.)

I'M a huge Golive fan, largely because I was hooked since Golive Cyberspace 1 (I think it was called) in the pre-adobe years.
They had great customer support and one gets used to apps, so I stuck to it. And while I liked CS better, the Adobe integration wasn't a bad thing per se.

Through the years I've learned how to avoid little quirks, knew how to use it to the limit and still have ridiculously clean and proper code. It really pays to be intimate with an application from the start. So I am sad, because I did plan to upgrade. But the WYSIWYG simplicity promise was never for real, I've seen many designers despair and eventually learn how to code by hand - which IMO still is the only valid way to make good (meaning useable) websites. CSS made things a lot better, but then again, Golive and CSS, it doesn't really work as advertised.

Oh well, I've used Dreamweaver, so I know it's good, and it seems better at outputting proper code, but well, one does get used to things, and DW always seemed too particular to my taste.

I hope the DW GUI makeover will make it more familiar (to me), because I've heard really positive things about CSS and PHP friendliness.

So overall, I'm positive, I think.

No change to the substance of your question, but to be pedantic when Adobe bought Aldus, the company that did the engineering on FreeHand, Altsys Corporation, sued to have the rights to FreeHand returned to them. Then Macromedia bought Altsys.

Ah I will surely miss golive. I hope they reflow how Dreamweaver works - like flash - the UI was not the most efficient. Golives regular expression searches are the best - cant a website dev app without it.

I just started a Master's program in Educational Technology. They wanted me to buy Dreamweaver, but I've been with GoLive since the beginning and was going to "fight the powers". Now my future is sealed. Without reporting like this, I'd have been able to save $$$.

Just kidding, I'm glad they finally decided which programs to let go.

One of my first experiences on a Mac was learning and using Aldus Freehand and really liked using it better that Illustrator. But by the time version 10 came out Macromedia lost interest in it and it started to flounder. For me and a few computers I manage it ended up being buggy and unstable. The following version(s) seemed to curb most of that but Macromedia was content on not doing much with the application.

I've been using Illustrator for just about as long as I have Freehand and hope that Adobe will incorporate some of the features of Freehand in the next version of Illustrator. (Multiple pages for example.)

GoLive is an application I never really learned. I have an older version and ended up using Dreamweaver more and have been quite content using Dreamweaver that I never felt compelled going back to GoLive for another try.

When I first started out as a designer Freehand was much better than Illustrator but once Macromedia got it's hands on it all bets were off. Since then Freehand has been a thorn in my side since I work with some real old timers who won't let go of it. Now I won't have to deal with it anymore - so happy. As far as GoLive is concerned, I have no feeling - I have always used BBEdit for all my web work.

I preferred GoLive. Hopefully they will revise DreamWeaver so it has a more Adobe like interface, Flash too.

Quote

fultonkbd wrote:
...hope that Adobe will incorporate some of the features of Freehand in the next version of Illustrator. (Multiple pages for example.)

Why am I not seeing the reason for this? Lotsa people request this feature, but all I can see is it adding "feature bloat". Although you CAN design pages with Illustrator, InDesign (or Quark Xpress if you're stuck with that) is really a better tool for that. Illustrator is good for, well, illustrations... and logos... and visual elements you'd put into your page design.

Anybody who has Illustrator very likely has Photoshop, so if you bought both, then you have the Creative Suite (or previously, a "collection"), so you have InD already there. There's your multi-page document right there.

+

Just a few simple comments and observations regarding the immenent demise of GoLive:


NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NO, no, no, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!

And furthermore,

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Thank you all for listening....

I got Freehand from a Director at a Baby Bell in 1989 and have loved ever since. I now have had both Freehand and Illustrator. I feel Ill is for fine art and Freehand for commercial art. But throughout the years I have edited .ai files in Freehand faster and more efficiently than in Illustrator. And when I could no longer open Ill files I knew something was up. When it comes to time, Freehand is far faster and easier to use.

I have Ill CS and have been forcing myself to get use to it. But it is a labor intensive piece of software and always has been. And Freehand has many common neat things that you can do that are bitch in Ill.

So long Freehand and, Up &*#@~ Adobe.

"Well, wet the bed..."

According to MacWorld at

http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/05/31/adobe/index.php

the reports are not true.

quote="fultonkbd"]Anybody who has Illustrator very likely has Photoshop, so if you bought both, then you have the Creative Suite (or previously, a "collection"), so you have InD already there. There's your multi-page document right there.[/quote]

Multi-pages indeed. Please let us know when AI gets multi pages that feature varying sizes. That way I can build an entire identity set such as business cards, envelopes and letterhead all in the same document.

I've been with GoLive since version 3 when they were at the MacWorld Expo, back when it was "GoLive Cyberstudio" Man, I really enjoy this program and dread the thought of using Dreamweaver. I even know that Dreamweaver is better... but GoLive does everything I need, and it still has the coolest interface. Man, this is kinda sad. Oh well, I'll keep using til the end. Even if it's phased out, the current version, or the next one will still be good for at least a few years. God bless.

Adobe "officially" denies it's dropping either app. That rings hollow to any Mac FrameMaker user who believed Adobe would quit dragging their feet and get an OSX-native version running.

Frankly, Adobe saying they're not dropping a product says nothing about what they actually plan to do.

I'm a designer and prefer GoLive. My co-worker is a programmer and prefer Dreamweaver, that's it. If a new tool for design web sites is going to be released, it must have the best of both, GoLive and Dreamweaver, mixed.
I think is an error to adopt the name dreamweaver instead of golive and exclude the last one. A better decision should be to adopt a new name as DreamLive, LiveWeaver and so on...

Ill i have to say is that illustrator DOES need the multi page layout option. Currently i'm using CorelDraw for those purposes and it works fine. I expected some real extended functionality by illustrator 10, but they seem to lagg. There's nothing wrong with function overload, if you dont need it, dont use it.It's why they invented workspaces within applications.