I had a quick play, and without having to follow any tutorials quickly made a very simple 4-page site using a master page. OK - so far so good - Muse is a kind of "Dreamweaver lite" with a more designer-friendly interface. We've downloaded the beta, and the interface will certainly be familiar to all you Photoshop and InDesign users out there: So who is Adobe Muse for, and what can it do?Īdobe Muse's strapline is " Create websites as easily as you create layouts for print" - so it's clear that this product is aimed squarely at print designers who want to build websites (the tool was created by the team behind InDesign)
ADOBE EDGE CODE VS DREAMWEAVER PROFESSIONAL
They are theme based, and don't have as much flexibility in terms of layout design as Dreamweaver - but nevertheless can deliver professional results. Via simple interfaces and easy to use plugins, these tools allow people with genuinely NO programming experience to set up sites with interaction and social integration. This is where blog and web design CMS systems like Wordpressand Joomla have come in to their own in recent years. (all of which are really important now), increasingly requires more coding experience.
But - to use Dreamweaver effectively to produce dynamic sites which include blogs, social integration etc. It hasn't done a bad job of that, and remains a very useful design tool and code editor (Dreamweaver CS5.5 also includes tools for mobile authoring - which is the biggest growth area in web design at the moment). Hang on a minute though! Adobe already has the industry standard WYSIWYG web design tool on its books in the shape of Dreamweaver - which has been around for a LONG time (we've been running web design training since 1999 and our Dreamweaver course was the first Silicon Beach Training ever offered!)ĭreamweaver was originally released in the age of static HTML pages - and has had to reinvent itself over the years to keep up in the age of dynamic database driven websites. It's a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) tool. Whatever it ends up being called - Muse is a web design tool that allows designers without any coding experience to create website designs and publish them without having to look at any HTML. Adobe is currently "working with the branding team to determine the final name of this product" (perhaps the developers are fans of the Devon rock band of the same name!) Muse is a "code name" - so we wait with baited breath to see what the final product will be called. Then last week, they also lifted the lid on Adobe Muse. You might like to check out my summary of Adobe Edge (and my atrocious attempt at an animation).
We recently saw the unveiling of Adobe Edge - a potential future replacement for Flash which creates animations using HTML5. Well well well - it seems that Adobe can't stop releasing previews and betas at the moment!