“During the Adobe Live event, Robert Raiola of Adobe Systems France said that Adobe will halt the development of Freehand and GoLive, according to MacGeneration… Adobe will concentrate all its efforts on Illustrator 13 and Dreamweaver (which will have a new interface similar to other adobe products). The canning of Freehand and GoLive is no big surprise. Since Adobe purchased Macromedia, the company had two illustration packages (Freehand and Illustrator) and two web design apps (GoLive and Dreamweaver) in its repertoire. As these products were previously competitors, it seemed likely only one in each category would survive,” Dennis Sellers reports for Macsimum News.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Adobe has done a good job by keeping the best apps overall in each category. We would have picked Illustrator and Dreamweaver over Freehand and GoLive respectively, too. Hopefully, Adobe will find ways to take the good ideas in Freehand and GoLive and integrate them into Illustrator and Dreamweaver.
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Related MacDailyNews article:
Buh-bye Freehand? Adobe offers Freehand to Illustrator migration guide – April 26, 2006
“Frustrator and DreamLiver”
LOL!!!!!!!
“I guess most preferences are formed by whichever package you learned first.”
Or not. I started out with Dreamweaver for my first couple of years of Web design. That’s the graphical design program with which I learned HTML. However, I left it a few years ago. The Mac version was just too slow and too bloated. They boasted features that were worthless to me.
For me, GoLive was a better fit. It was much faster and they had at least some (and later much) native support for Lasso.
Fortunately I rarely venture near graphical Web development software anymore, but I guess I’ll give the revamped Dreamweaver a look when it comes out. If they can get the speed, Adobe interface, and native Lasso support of GoLive into Dreamweaver, it may turn out okay.
I found GoLive to be much easier to use than Dreamweaver. Lets hope the just give dreamweaver the GoLive interface.
Well, a link to this German website http://www.macnews.de/news/76355 shows some other news. They say the news about Freehand are in fact not true. Apparently they are still continuing support for it as a stand alone application, similarly as Macromedia did the last few years, where Freehand also was not part of the Suite anymore.
I guess we’ll have to wait for something official though.
*Taps*
Great I just bought GoLive.
Ugh. DreamWeaver. It’s got the worst interface in the world. Typical Macromedia.
I hope Adobe is successful in replacing it – COMPLETELY. It isn’t intuitive at all. And DreamWeaver’s WYSIWYG layout area is terrible compared to GoLive’s.
Oh well, it was pretty obvious anyway that Dreamweaver would replace GoLive. Adobes perpetual non support of GoLive was just pathetic. I only hope they support Dreamweaver better. Cause that’s’ what I’ll be using – Again.
What about all the great support that GoLive had for native Illustrator and Photoshop files? That’s just awesome. Hope they add that right away.
I just wish that some dedicated company could pick up where Freehand left. It’s still far ahead of todays illustrator as of modeling features. I’m not saying that illustrator completely sucks, it’s just not as intelligent built. Most of the designers I deal with use both apps – since both have their strengths and weaknesses – but I know most of these people agree on Freehand’s modeling superiority. Illustrator still can’t lock single bezier points – nor is it possible to align single bezier points.
I don’t really care which program was better. Personally I work in Canvas, just because that’s what I learned first. Instable as hell, though ..
The only thing that matters is choice. So seeing Freehand go is sad.
I’m just waiting for the OSX port of Xara Xtreme. See what that has to offer.
MDN Word: ‘Choice’, how convenient.
I’ve never used Go Live but I’ve worked on a few sites that were developed with it, it puked out some ugly code. That was a year or so ago, maybe it got better, but I say thank goodness it’s getting ready to flatline. Though not perfect, dreamweaver code is much easier to work with, lets hope Adobe doesn’t muck that up.
Apparently, MDN doesn’t really understand the differences between Illustrator and Freehand, judging by its take.
Illustrator’s one advantage is integration with Photoshop. It’s limited to ONE PAGE, even in the 21st century.
Freehand has had multiple page support for ages. It has search and replace font and graphic styles.
Illustrator’s code base would need major reworking to bring forth all of Freehand’s capabilities. This is a BIG LOSS, just due to Adobe politics. They won’t get all of Freehand into Illustrator for 3 versions, if ever, unless they do a MAJOR rewrite.
Over the years I am becoming more and more frustrated with Adobe and its various products, and marketing tactics. I would really love to see more/any competition in these areas. Maybe Open Source will eventually begin to provide real alternatives.
Adobe is a software behemoth and real competition would do nothing but good for it and us.
Whatever it takes to keep you upgrading Creative Suite.
Be ready: The “software features” aquired from Macromedia will be slowly “included” in 6 successive versions of CS over the next decade, where they’ll ask 60% of the original investment price for each upgrade, all at the expense of actually innovating. Word to the wise: Don’t let anyone in your team upgrade to a CS version unless you’re willing to drop enough cash for all users to upgrade. If the move between CS1 and CS2 was any measure of “the new” Adobe’s intentions, then keep your people on whatever version they’re all on, and hold out as long as you can (until enough features that are important to you have been added and sucessfully tested to ensure a smooth transition).
MW:However can we keep our shareholders happy?
Illustrator SUCKS.
(have been working all week end with the p.o.s. and just had to get it out)
Dreamweaver sucks, I have over the years tried over and over to look at it, I coudnt get myself into it more than 15 minutes and gave up.
Sad news when big companies buy up software and then F*CK it up relly good.
Thanks Af*%ckindobe
Expected. And for good reason. I prefer the interface of GoLive to Dreamweaver – it just seemed that all of Macromedia’s interfaces were very not very “professional-looking” – for lack of a better word. Illustrator is the king of the illustration apps – not apologies to all of you Freehanders – it’s just the truth.
I hope Adobe will do the same with Photoshop vs. Fireworks. I’d love to see some of FW integrated into PS especially the pop-up menu creator. Fireworks is another academic program.
Maybe the Omni group can pickup freehand and continue development yea! right. Other than Indesign and the pdf format Adobe is starting to piss me off.
What does some Frod flack know about what Adobe in California is deciding to do?
There’s no way he knows what he’s talking about.
GoLive is for designers. Dreamweaver is for codeheads. Let them use BBEdit!
Er, Frog.
I have worked in Illustrator and FreeHand. Illustrator now is at least a generation ahead of Freehand in user interface and overall “feel”.
And being a GoLive user since version 1 I have tried to learn Dreamweaver recently. One word: Dreamweaver sucks! Its CSS implementation sucks, it is slow like molasses, its interface sucks big time and its file management is ridiculous compared to GoLives Finder-like solution.
What’s the point of buying a great software like GoLive only to kill it some years later? I could understand buying crappy software like freehand to reap some code out of it before killing it…
Good one MDN:
“good ideas in GoLive”…ROTFL–
There were a lot of things to like about GoLive. I began with CyberStudio and Dreamweaver 2 demos after giving up on PageMill and it took all of 5 seconds to buy Cyberstudio (By GoLive). Mainly because of interface. Dreamweaver is code first layout and design second, the exact opposite of GoLive. I gave up GoLive when Adobe axed the dynamic content module and have been using Dreamweaver since.
Here are ‘good ideas’ I’d like to see make it to Dreamweaver:
Site management – just blows DW away
Interface – it’s subjective but I hate DW’s office looking palettes even though Adobe sued them for their tabbed interface
I liked the Live Source elements in GoLive – MM tried this with DW and I think they fell short.
And using the open and save dialog boxes – GL gave you a button to take you to the root of the current site. I think this is very handy, there are many times I had to navigate file structures because DW couldn’t remember what site I was working in. Although SpotLight has alleviated this a bit.
Better Mac development – How long did it take MM to get tabbed windows to Mac. MM really did not develop for Mac as much as window$.
I think there is quite a bit DW could learn from GoLive. I really look forward to seeing how it turns out.
Freehand. it’s a shame. I learned Illustrator first but when to Freehand when v 10 came out. Illustrator 10 probably made this happen. It just did not select shapes I wanted selected or point’s or paths. I still see a bit of that in CS2. The way Freehand uses the white and black arrows is fantastic. When using the white (direct select?) tool, why does Illustrator force you to click a shape on it’s path, remember where the points are, deselect then click the points. Freehand did a MUCH better job at handling shapes and points.
Also I’d like ImageReady to DIE DIE DIE. I never liked that app and I think Fireworks is a great. It is sooo much better at compressing jpgs. Since getting StudioMX it even took time away from Photoshop.
Lots of interesting remarks.
There seems to be an assumption that elements from GoLive will find their way into Dreamweaver. For some reason I’m not holding my breath.
I guess it’s a good thing that GoLive WILL keep functioning on my G4 Powerbook for years yet … I can wait until an acceptable alternative come out … be it Dreamweaver or some other app.