Just incase you may have missed it…

Adobe has announced that it will discontinue its one-time flagship website creation tool, Adobe GoLive. The rumor mill has long held that Dreamweaver, a web development tool that came into the Adobe fold following the 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, would one day replace GoLive and now it seems that the day has finally arrived.

Although GoLive is still for sale on the Adobe site, Devin Fernandez, GoLive’s product manager, tells Macworld that the company believes Dreamweaver is a better fit for today’s web developer.

Adobe has been touting Dreamweaver over GoLive for some time, complete with a “switcher” website dedicated to convincing GoLive users that Dreamweaver was better suited to their needs.

The demise of GoLive shouldn’t come as too great of a surprise considering that the switcher site itself reads: “before purchasing Adobe GoLive 9 software, consider Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, the market-leading tool to design, develop, and maintain websites and web applications.” That’s not exactly the kind of faith in GoLive that inspires purchasing confidence.

If you’ve got a brand new shiny copy of GoLive 9, fear not, Adobe plans to support GoLive users with online tutorials and help, as well as assistance for those that want to migrate to Dreamweaver. There will also be special $200 upgrade price for GoLive users who want to make the leap to Dreamweaver.

GoLive isn’t the first app to bite the dust as a result of the MAcromedia acquisition, previously Adobe retired Macromedia’s Freehand app in favor of Adobe’s homegrown Illustrator CS3.

For more information, go to…

• Adobe GoLive
  
• MacWorld: Article
• Switch from GoLive to Dreamweaver
• WashingtonPost.com: Article

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The Open Screen Project is dedicated to driving consistent rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics. The Open Screen Project is supported by technology leaders, including Adobe, ARM, Chunghwa Telecom, Cisco, Intel, LG Electronics Inc., Marvell, Motorola, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics Co., Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Verizon Wireless, and leading content providers, including BBC, MTV Networks, and NBC Universal, who want to deliver rich Web and video experiences, live and on-demand across a variety of devices.

The Open Screen Project is working to enable a consistent runtime environment – taking advantage of Adobe® Flash® Player and, in the future, Adobe AIR™ — that will remove barriers for developers and designers as they publish content and applications across desktops and consumer devices, including phones, mobile internet devices (MIDs), and set top boxes. The Open Screen Project will address potential technology fragmentation by allowing the runtime technology to be updated seamlessly over the air on mobile devices. The consistent runtime environment will provide optimal performance across a variety of operating systems and devices, and ultimately provide the best experience to consumers.

Specifically, this work will include:

• Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• Removing licensing fees – making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

For more information, go to…

• Open Screen Project
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• Open Screen Project: For Business
• Open Screen Project: For Developers
• Press Release
• Open Screen Project: Supporters

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With the release of many (if not all) of the Adobe CS3 Packages comes a nice new release of Adobe’s famous PDF creator, Acrobat. Throughout school I became familiar with Adobe Acrobat 7, using it to put together mockups of websites without needing to do any hard coding. Although it took a little while to get used to, once you know your whereabouts in the program it’s fairly easy to use. This is until the release of Acrobat 8.

My initial opinion: Acrobat 8 is a miracle worker. Pulling other files together to make one packaged pdf, it’s so simple and so easy to use; just follow the giant buttons they put in front of you. However, beyond the initial creation of the PDF, Acrobat 8’s features can be difficult to find. Things like bookmarking and paging are still very simple, but more complicated interactive features such as linking pages through buttons are far more difficult to locate. Is the easy initial set up worth the wall of confusion once the pdf is sewn? The difference between versions 7 and 8 are worlds apart. I suppose all of us with experience with prior versions will have to do something no one ever wants to do….read the manual.

Besides the bit of confusion, overall the facelift which Acrobat received was a fairly nice one. A user with little experience of sewing files into pdfs will find this program very friendly and easy to use.

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On March 18, Adobe revealed its plans to begin development on an iPhone ready version of its proprietary media player, Flash. This came after Apple’s release of an iPhone software developer’s kit or SDK. There has been an ongoing controversy over how and when Flash, a now internet staple, would be supported by the popular handheld device.

Current Flash technology is said to be “too slow to be useful” by Steve Jobs, and no faster or lighter version exists which will provide much value to the Web experience on an iPhone. So the question arises, how will this middle man solution affect not only iPhones but the technology used on PC’s and Mac’s currently? If a faster, lighter version can be created for iPhones, why not create it for traditional Web browsing? Also, if Apple continues to demand only standalone applications in its guidelines, how will they handle the long agonized over Flash plug-in? There are many more questions to be answered before the iPhone can compare to traditional internet browsing in terms of interactivity and impact; all the things that Flash enables on the Web.

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Greetings-

As a soon to be graduate from a college institution, I find myself reflecting upon a time when advanced web design and new software presented itself as a giant question mark.  What to do, how to learn, what to learn, and methods of implementation all begged for answers, and for anyone venturing out on their own- these questions can be a little intimidating.  And just as eager young minds strive to find new techniques and design tricks,  every good designer is constantly learning, exploring, and probing for ways to beef up their skills.

With that preamble, below I will share a few links I find useful in… well, just having some fun within some pretty amazing software.

For basic flash tutorials or forums used to work out frustrating problems or general  inquiries, check this site out:

http://www.kirupa.com/developer/flash/index.htm

For those looking to find special effects techniques in Photoshop, the link below should satisfy some of your curiosity.  There are also contests for those of you who already have your Photoshop muscles bulging like the Hulk.  But seriously, who doesn’t want to turn themselves into a marble statue or a celebrity photo into an alien life-form?

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorials.asp

And lastly for now, for those of us fascinated by the power of Adobe’s After Effects, a website that allows even us n00bs to create 3-d room tours and ink splatter intros!

http://library.creativecow.net/tutorials/adobeaftereffects 

That’s all for now, but hopefully that provides some entertainment for beginners through advanced designers poking around on the net.

Later days!

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When talking about the new features in Adobe’s newest release of its Creative Suite, no one can go without discussing the newly acquired “eraser” tool for Illustrator CS3. When working with vector graphics and images, nothing can be quite as frustrating as needing to trim up a layer/shape. Designers have been ever-longing for an easier route than make-shift divides and subtracts with the Pathfinder tool, or tedious adjustments of points and anchors with the pen tool. Now a user can very easily swipe pieces of vector shapes away, and are left with a just as beautiful vector in its place. Many speculate the slightly rough edge that it puts on, as almost no one can have that perfect curve when using a traditional mouse, but there are plenty of tools to help that, the easiest being the “Smoothing Tool” (looks like a pencil with lines all across it). To ensure a careful erase, make sure only the shapes in which you want to subtract from are selected. With the shapes selected just use the eraser tool similar to how you would in a photo editing program, such as Photoshop. This tool could quite possibly be the biggest advantage to the new release of Illustrator.

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