Adobe's latest revision of its Web publishing application continues to mature into a powerful and sophisticated tool. Packed with new features, Adobe GoLive 5.0 offers enhanced source-code control to help Web teams edit and maintain large sites; improved linking of Photoshop, Illustrator, and LiveMotion files; and a new interface that's designed to increase efficiency. For designers who like to get under the hood, GoLive 5.0 now features simultaneous viewing of HTML source code and a WYSIWYG view of the page itself. Each window is editable, and changes take place immediately in both windows. GoLive also can import native Photoshop, Illustrator, and LiveMotion documents. When you double-click on an element in GoLive, the document is opened in the application that created it. After changes are made in the native application and the document is saved, the file is automatically updated in GoLive.
Two welcome new features are the History palette for going back in time and undoing a set of actions, and the Alignment palette for accurately lining up and distributing rows and columns of elements.
If GoLive has a drawback, it's the number of palettes that sprawl across the screen; a high-resolution monitor or dual-monitor setup goes a long way toward alleviating the crowd factor. Compatibility with Photoshop 6 and Illustrator 9 is problematic, but presumably a patch or some new version of GoLive (version 5.1?) is imminent; they are, after all, part of the same Adobe family.
Clearly, Adobe's GoLive 5.0 has some stiff competition (namely, Macromedia's Dreamweaver), but GoLive also has some virtues of its own. If you're already comfortable with other Adobe applications, GoLive's learning curve should present only a small hurdle. The application is stable and deep, and has enough features to help any site designer build almost any kind of site. --Mike Caputo
