TechRadar Verdict
GoLive is easy to use yet powerful, but isn't so good at powerful development work
Pros
- +
Built-in live rendering with Opera
Simulate mobile phone browsers
Easier to use than Dreamweaver
Auto-export web graphics from CS2 files
Cons
- -
Bit buggy
No help with dynamic pages
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GoLive has been the poorer cousin of Dreamweaver over the last few years, which is a shame, because in many ways it's a superior app.
For one thing, GoLive is easier to use. It's WYSIWYG, just like Dreamweaver, but its 'layout grid' option for building pixel-accurate layouts helps to overcome the limitations of Dreamweaver's purer 'layout tables' approach.
Its palettes of page elements are more extensive and useful than Dreamweaver's. It integrates better with Creative Suite apps like Photoshop and Illustrator, generating web graphics of the exact dimensions you require from native file formats of any size, updating them whenever you alter the originals.
As well as all this, GoLive has a built-in rendering system based on the Opera browser that lets you see how your page is working out, moment by moment, without having to 'Preview in Browser'.
It also has far better support for mobile standards, such as mobile XHTML, and a rendering system that simulates most of the popular mobile phone browsers.
It includes page elements and templates for MovableType and TypePad blogging services, and it has its own mini-multimedia studio for generating QuickTime tracks and DHTML animations.
But there are deficiencies. It's buggy, and it has little of the dynamic web page support of Dreamweaver, only promising not to rewrite any scripting code it finds, rather than giving you help in creating your own code. It's also inferior when dealing with more uncommon standards such as XML, XSLT and ASP.Net.
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If you're looking for an advanced package and are happy to fill in any blanks with hand-coding, GoLive is excellent. If you're looking for something that can deal well with the very peak of web development, it doesn't quite have what it takes. Rob Buckley
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