By Jed Clampett

January 15, 2000

GoLive 5 has gone through a tremendous transformation from GoLive 4. The most important one to me as far as usability is the 360 degree code capabilities. GoLive 5 does not touch your custom programmed code.  You can also view your layout and the code at the same time in separate windows. The main drawback is that the code GoLive 5 generates is not always standard compliant.

The interface has been updated to be more "Adobe Like" and more consistent with other Adobe products. One change is both good and bad at the same time is the addition of palettes. Where version 4 had 6 floating palettes GoLive 5 has 17! Hey we want more feature it brings with it more palettes. But they can be grouped and docked together. 

With so many palettes GoLive 5 looks extremely intimidating at first. Well, actually it is a bit intimidating and carries a pretty steep learning curve with it. If you are thinking of investing your cash and time in learning GoLive 5, or have already, then you should seriously consider picking up the Real World Adobe GoLive book. It's more than worth it's cost in timesaving instruction. If you need to learn the basics to start using GoLive 5 quickly you may want to consider the Adobe GoLive 5 classroom in a book. Either way, to really get a handle on all the powerful features of GoLive 5 you'll need some kind of outside resource. Adobe produces such fantastic programs and fall drastically short when it comes to the product manuals.

One of the new features is the Design tab which contains a prototyping tool that allows you to sketch your site, or use pieces parts of templates and sites. You can drag in new pages and even add links (which you have to manually add the links later, oh well can't have everything I suppose). When you are satisfied you can submit the pages for staging which will automatically add all the pages to your main site. You even have the ability to recall if you change your mind and GoLive keeps track of the relationships as you submit and recall designs.

Embedding objects couldn't be easier. Flash, SVG, Real Networks G2, can all be dragged onto your page. GoLive 5 adds all the <EMBED> and <OBJECT> code for you.

For the power user needing more robust site management GoLive 5 supports WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning), which allows other production members to check pages in and out of the WebDAV server and stage the site.

Another great feature is the ability to prepare your graphics for the Web right inside of GoLive 5 without leaving. You can import native Photoshop and Ai and LiveMotion files and make each layer a separate floating box that can be applied to your layout. Photoshop, Illustrator and LiveMotion files can be placed as "Smart Objects" as a Smart Object they can be edited from the original file. If for instance you make the image smaller, it is automatically re-optimized! This feature will save tons of bandwidth, especially for those misguided designers who believe by dragging an image smaller they have actually decreased the file size.

The tracing image feature is where you can use a layout produced in any other program as tracing paper. You lower the opacity and design the page in GoLive using it as a template of sort. Pretty cool but Adobe takes it even further, this next feature is quite impressive. You can actually use parts of the tracing image and put them into floating boxes that in turn become part of the layout!

There are many more features (about 100 new features) to GoLive 5 but this should give you a good idea of what to expect. Overall GoLive 5 has come a long way and the interface is very comfortable for users of other Adobe products. If you have purchased other Adobe products recently you probably received a $99 offer for GoLive 5, you certainly can't beat that price for so much program!

http://www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html

Copyright 2001, Jed Clampett, All Rights Reserved