Part 2 - Palettes, Rollovers, Actions, Smart Objects, CSS, ASCII Characters Previous   Next

New Palettes
With the addition of several new floating palettes, and the maintenance confusion this can add to your workspace, Adobe has implemented the ability to save and restore workspace setups. You can also minimize each palette down to its title bar along any side of the screen.

But, I wish I could resize the palette boxes to be narrower. Even though I work on a 21" monitor, I still find the palettes to be just a little too wide. Again, though, I work in Source Mode. When I have the window pulled out to be about 75% of available space (just enough to have the Objects Palette open and the working window as big as I can without having the palette covering any of it up), a line of code such as an image tag takes up nearly the whole window. The Inspector Palette is wider than the Objects Palette, and covers up my working window.

Does this sound picky? Well, maybe it is, but tools such as this one are built so our work can be made easier, not introduce new inconveniences.

Rollovers
GoLive 6 gives you rollover options - Smart or Lean. Lean rollovers incorporate basic Javascript to create the most simple rollover effect, offering maximum flexibility, and the cleanest--or leanest--code. After initial setup, the code can be further edited by an experienced Javascript programmer if more functionality is desired. (The Javascript editor is basically a text editor, with no syntax checking. So, this application is not one to help you learn Javascript). Smart rollovers go a little further enabling you to have nested Javascript and nested Actions. Both levels of rollovers understand over and down states, as long as the two or three images used are kept together in the same folder and abide by some simple naming rules.

Actions
Speaking of Actions, there are a lot of new ones included with version 6. (Adobe includes more than 80 Actions in this version.) GoLive Actions (interface-driven JavaScript and DHTML) are very useful, yet complex gadgets. But the user-friendly interface makes coding them not so nasty a task. And, thanks to Adobe's Xchange, there are a lot of already-written ones available for the asking.

Smart Objects
Speaking of smartness, the smart objects are probably my favorite thing about GoLive. What is cool about these is that graphics can be resized and edited while remaining fully optimized for the Web. In the past this feature was limited to Adobe's graphic formats, but with version 6, there is a generic Smart Object which can be used with various other formats.

But the most robust feature set comes with Adobe's graphic formats. With Photoshop and Illustrator SmartObjects you can resize a sliced image, such as an entire imagemap, and GoLive will automatically update all slices and the associated HTML table. GoLive also recognizes variables embedded into Illustrator and LiveMotion files as well as the topmost text layer in a Photoshop PSD. An example of using embedded variables is in the Convert Text to Banner command. You select any HTML text and automatically turn it into a graphic based on any existing PSD, AI or SVG. You can even control SVG charts directly in GoLive and change a LiveMotion object’s appearance or animation style. This would be very helpful in creating navigation bars - create one background and use the Convert to Banner command to create multiple buttons with different text but the same background.

Cascading Style Sheets
The Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) capability has been enhanced. You can create a style by getting into the editor and using the Inspector. But I have to admit this feature was not intuitive. The "Help" file told me how cool the editor was, and how to create things once I got in there, but didn't tell me how to open it. After investigating, I found it. Either click the icon on the workspace, or go into Window, then CSS.

ASCII Characters
I can't imagine that I am the only one who uses ASCII characters in my content. I regularly use <, &, ™, ©, etc. But I could not figure out how to drag-and-drop from the ASCII table. The Help manual told me how to add a new character to the table, but not how to extract info from that table. Aargh.

More of this Review
Previous	[Part 1 - Source vs Layout]
	[Part 2 - Palettes, Rollovers, Actions, Smart Objects, CSS, ASCII Characters]
Next	[Part 3 - Dynamic Content, Templates, Wireless Support, Layout Grids & Tables, Multimedia]
	[Part 4 - Workflow and Team Involvement, Search And Replace, Spell Checking, Final Words]