I just spoke to adobes expert support and they told me that dreamweaver and golive are the same program. Is that true, are they very very similar? I have expert support that covers golive but wont cover dreamweaver as of yet. I am in the market for either and it sure would be nice if my support program covered it. Anyone use either? Any thoughts of which to get? Thanks TAG

I can't really give you a fair assement, I haven't used GoLive in years and my version of DreamWeaver is also a few years old. But I will say that my old Dreamweaver is fairly intuitive, and when GoLive first came out, it was anything but. It may have made drastic changes since then, but I also believe Adobe has bought Macromedia. So he may very well be right. Adobe might have fixed GoLive, by buying Dreamweaver, and putting their name on it ;)

The programs are totally different (although in the end they do the same thing).

Adobe is selling both of them still for some crazy reason... Dreamweaver is "industry-leading" for a reason.

Chris

GoLive was Adobe's attempt at a web design program...I thought it sucked.

Dreamweaver from Macromedia was always much better. Now that Adobe owns Macromedia, it wouldn't surprise me to see GoLive die the fiery death it deserves.

Adobe is selling both of them still for some crazy reasonActually, I hear they're phasing out both golive and illustrator.

Illustrator? That's retarded. I use Illustrator EVERY DAY. What other drawing program is that popular and good?

You know Keith, maybe I got that backwards. Maybe it's Freehand they're pulling the plug on. I guess that would make more sense.

Yeah, Freehand was Macromedia's "GoLive". They tried to copy Illustrator, but juuuuust missed it being functional.

Illustrator? That's retarded. I use Illustrator EVERY DAY. What other drawing program is that popular and good?


Hey Keith could you answer me an illustrator question. I design things in photoshop, the printer's (T-shirts) always need it in vector format so they can open it in thier presses. I've always seem to been able to figure out a round about way to get it from psd to eps, most of the time by asking someone to do it for me.

Granted, some of the t-shirt vendors are not the sharpest, although some of them are. In the future when I design in photoshop, is there a way that I can convert to vector eps w/o buying illustrator?

I tried to use illustrator once, but it's not something I would need daily to justify the expense.

Hi all, thanks for the help. It sure sounded funny when they said they were the same program. Im off to buy the weaver, dreamweaver. Thanks TAG

Steven I think there is some plugin that will trace your art and create bezier curves. However, I have no idea how well it will do it. And it would probably mean you would have to make it for each layer.

Photoshop itself has the pen tool which works about the same as it does in Illustrator, just lacking a lot of the nice features that Illustrator has to edit your curves. If you learned how to use the pen tool you could get by, but then by learning the pen tool you might as well jump into Illustrator.

Your T shirt vendor is not dumb. Accepting your raster art might mean they have to deal with extremely large files to get the resolution high enough whereas a vector artwork would be easily handled.

Using the pen tool in Photoshop, is about as bad as the pen tool in Freehand. Illustrator really does rock with their's.

Thanks, I'll keep that in mind.

When I used to hang out on the Adobe forums (I use GoLive 6.0) the general consensus seemed to be that the Dreamweaver UI was more suited for the programming type, while the GoLive UI was geared more towards the graphic designer type. I really don't know myself as I never tried Dreamweaver. Both have good WYSIWYG tools and can do source code editing, of course, plus many other goodies that come with such high priced programs. ;-)

One thing I do know. Adobe removed the Dynamic Content module from GoLive that simplified basic database connections and basic data processing starting with the CS versions. If you need to connect to databases and manipulate data you can of course do all the coding by hand, but if you prefer some help, Dreamweaver would probably be the better choice.

anyone remember adobe's "flash-killer" app? it wasn't worth remembering.

having worked for interactive agencies off and on for many years, almost all used dreamweaver exclusively. like others, i haven't touched golive since early on, but the thing that got me hooked on dreamweaver was the split panes -- one for code, one wysiwig. you could easily jump back and forth, as well as see how the wysiwig environment was impacting the code (quite often to it's detriment). to me, it was the first wysiwig editor that was code-friendly.

on a side note, i doubt either freehand and illustrator are going anywhere anytime soon. freehand was the industry leader only less than 10 years ago, while illustrator was in it's growing stages, and it still enjoys widespread professional use outside the US. freelance illustrators from europe are always sending us freehand files. conversely, i haven't met an illustrator in the US who uses freehand, at least primarily. in a similar type of move, autodesk just bought maya, with the comparably powerful 3ds max still in its product catalog. both are industry leading 3d programs, and, likewise, you won't see either dropping off soon.

on a side note, i doubt either freehand and illustrator are going anywhere anytime soon.There are definitely rumors (http://www.macnn.com/articles/06/05/31/freehand.golive.dropped/), at least.

anyone remember adobe's "flash-killer" app? it wasn't worth remembering.
That certainly wasn't the feeling by many who used Adobe LiveMotion. As with GoLive/Dreamweaver, LiveMotion was viewed as much friendlier and easier to use for graphic designers, while Dreamweaver was considered a tool targeted more towards coders. Although LiveMotion did include scripting capability, as least in version two. Probably the reason it failed to gain traction was not due to any lack of features and capabilities, but rather not enough marketing by Adobe. If Adobe had truly wished to gain market share from an entrenched product like Flash, they would have needed to really push LiveMotion. Of course, the argument is moot now that Adobe purchased Macromedia. Hopefully Adobe can now incorporate the best of LiveMotion’s features (such as the intuitive timeline, with the ability to change the fps without losing the position of keyframes, etc.) into Flash.

like others, i haven't touched golive since early on, but the thing that got me hooked on dreamweaver was the split panes -- one for code, one wysiwig. you could easily jump back and forth, as well as see how the wysiwig environment was impacting the code (quite often to it's detriment).GoLive also features a split pane for WYSIWYG and code editing.

jarrod, thanks for the link.

christopher,
i'm sorry if my comment on livemotion seemed a little harsh. i really didn't mean to convey it that way. in my experience, livemotion was not a fully developed product, and that can be attributed to the fact that the program is/was still in its infancy. for anything beyond straight keyframe animation (i.e., anything that involved scripting), livemotion was so unpredictable and buggy for us that i couldn't see it standing a chance in a deadline-oriented development environment. i'm sure most of these issues would have been cleared up by version 8 (which is what flash is on now), but as you said, flash was already entrenched in the interactive workplace, and based on my experience, a nicer ui and improved bitmap handling (tho flash 8 has really made some huge improvements here) were not close to enough to have designers and developers learn a new, less robust application to do pretty much the exact same thing.

and let me add that i thought i thought livemotion was actually marketed pretty brilliantly from the get go. when a company of adobe's reputation claims it has the "flash-killer" app, people take it very seriously. i remember the pre-release rumblings and excitement in the offices i worked at. and it actually got people to open the app for a few days to give it a shot. but, as far as i'm concerned, it just didn't have the legs.

christopher,
i'm sorry if my comment on livemotion seemed a little harsh. i really didn't mean to convey it that way. in my experience, livemotion was not a fully developed product, and that can be attributed to the fact that the program is/was still in its infancy.
That's fine. Obviously you found it didn't work for you. Since LiveMotion only reached version two I guess it couldn't be expected for it to have the capabilities of Flash.

I have used both, GL and DW.
DW hands down is a better program.
WYSIWYG, handcode, tables, CSS, client server, tons of 3rd party support/products. Plus you can really set DW up to your taste.

BTW, Illustrator now has very nice bitmap tracing, way better than FH or flash.

In the past the rule of thumb was MM for web, Adobe for everything else.
(I have always used PS, that's what I learned 1st so I never used FW).

Reality is, it's not so much the tools, as it is the hand using the tools. So take all this with a grain of salt.......

I own both DW and GoLive and DW is certainly the better of the two. For strict coding (PHP and ASP) I prefer to work in NotePad++ (free - just search for "notepad++" in google - availble as a SourceForge project). Its syntax highlighting is a little better than DW, IMO.

As far as discontuing FreeHand - I feel quite certain we won't see anymore updates for it. The last update was version 11.0.2 in February 2004. It shipped with Studio MX and saw only two minor updates (bug fixes) for Studio MX 2004. It wasn't even included in Studio 8.

Maybe we'll see CS3 include Flash 9 and DW 9 and get rid of GoLive ;)