goLive dead

I wasn't a GoLive user, but I'm not a Dreamweaver user either. Both seem kind of , well, "wussy". Although Dreamweaver could go away unnoticed by me, Adobe's announcement that it was killing GoLive brought on a tiny bit of grief. I remember seeing it demonstrated by a few Mac reps right after Adobe acquired it, and loved its drag and drop intuitive nature. But I just didn't use it. That is, not until I needed it.

When I was experimenting with captions in Quicktime, I wrestled with the idea of "Closed Captions"- captions that a user could turn off and on. I downloaded manuals from the Apple Quicktime site to find out how to do it and the answer was a programmable button called a "sprite" that sat in a special "sprite track" in Quicktime. When I discovered that our streaming media server would display captions, but not closed captions, I decided against using them. Then I did experiments with adding a description track to Quicktime movies. It seemed like a useful feature but a second audio track isn't something you would want to be always on. So I looked for tools again; and most sources pointed to GoLive as the tool of choice.

No one that I talked to had ever heard that GoLive did this sort of thing. It did webpages, sure, but it also facilitated the integration of media. I opened the application and sure enough, I could create multi-state buttons, embed them in the movie, and make them turn on a second audio track or open and close captions. Wow. Then I discovered that it would export media as Flash video. Wow again.

Now it's gone. Sniff.

Some sort of touchable hardware/software museum at Penn State would be an amazing tool. I used to have Photoshop 3.5 on a zip and Illustrator 5.5, too. I used them from the disks when I advised on design lists. They don't work any more. I guess GoLive will have a long disk life, but knowing it was available on suitable hardware would be a consolation.