New Year, New Tools                                                                    January 2004

Web developers have access to new software for the new year

The end of 2003 saw a flurry of activity by the main software houses involved in multimedia design, most notably in the case of Macromedia and Adobe. The release of Macromedia's Studio MX 2004 was well worth the wait, in particular for the much improved CSS tools – cascading style sheets that separate content and design. After years of bodged implementation in browsers, CSS will become increasingly important as web sites are viewed in different browsers, or different versions of IE at least, including those for handheld computers and web-enabled TVs as well as PCs.

While the development of new CSS tools in Dreamweaver MX 2004 is important, Flash is probably the most exciting part of the new Studio toolkit, particularly with regard to the professional version. This allows users to build complex, form-driven sites that can also connect to external databases, meaning that Flash is now way ahead of the competition for creating multimedia.

Not that Macromedia went unchallenged. Just a week after Studio shipped, Adobe announced a new Creative Suite that is bound to appeal to a number of developers and designers, featuring new (CS) versions of GoLive, Illustrator, InDesign and, of course, Photoshop.

Throughout the 1990s, Adobe and Macromedia developed complementary applications that appealed to overlapping but also distinctive areas of the creative community. With the rise of the web, competition between the two became rather bloody until, in 2000, Adobe sued Macromedia over an alleged patent infringement. Macromedia countersued, and in the end each company paid each other damages to settle a conflict that pleased no one but the lawyers.

GoLive CS has had a much harder task against Dreamweaver, but Adobe has done a great deal of work with the latest release of GoLive, however, and has at least one trick up its sleeve that will make it worth considering.

As with Dreamweaver , the program has taken to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) as offering real possibilities for enhanced design, including a dedicated editor to create sophisticated style elements separate to page content. Secondly, as part of the Creative Suite, GoLive's interface is becoming increasingly streamlined, with it being fully integrated with other applications in the suite – most notably InDesign, which includes a menu item for ‘Package to GoLive'.

And this is likely to be the real secret of GoLive's success. It still lags behind Dreamweaver MX as a standalone editor, but as one application in the arsenal of creatives who are responsible for web sites as well as print layouts (and photography, and illustration, and…) it will probably be turned to as the first choice.

Adobe and Macromedia may dominate professional and semi-professional level software, but they are not the only companies producing useful software. Netobjects caused a considerable stir when it released Fusion at the end of the nineties, offering probably the simplest interface around for creating sophisticated sites and incorporating some excellent management features.

You can order copies of the following books:
Web Production for Writers and Journalists in paperback.
The Internet: The Basics in paperback.
The Cyberspace Handbook in paperback.