Using GoLive: a personal note

We don't usually offer our personal opinions of products here at MacFixIt, but we are making an exception today. A few months ago, we decided to shift to either Dreamweaver or GoLive for working on MacFixIt. After briefly experimenting with both, we decided to go with GoLive (it was a close decision, both had their pros and cons). With countless hours of using GoLive now behind us, we remain impressed with GoLive's advanced capabilities and the ease with which it makes certain things possible (such as working with JavaScript). Still, we more often find ourselves frustrated with how hard GoLive makes it to accomplish the most basic tasks. We offer these examples (they do not exhaust our list!) in hopes that there is still time for these things to be addressed in the forthcoming GoLive 5.0 (if Adobe has not already done so): Creating links I may develop a repetitive strain injury just from trying to create the links on our home page each day. It requires far more clicking and typing than it should. After you highlight the text you wish to turn into a link, you have to click on a Link icon in the toolbar. This is okay so far. But then, before you can enter the link URL, you have to go to the Inspector window (in fact, clicking on the Link tool does not automatically open the Inspector window, so you will have yet another step here if the window is not yet open). Making sure that the Link tab of the Inspector is active, you now have to click on the URL text box and highlight the default phrase "Empty Reference" (why is this phrase even needed?). Just clicking in the text box does not highlight the phrase, which is why you have to make the extra step of highlighting the text before you enter your URL. At last, you enter the URL link. But be sure to press Return or click the Return arrow icon, or your URL will not actually be entered. By my count, that was at least six steps (mouse clicks, drags and/or keyboard commands) to create a single link. In contrast, the same action in Claris Home Page takes only three steps. Update: Jeffrey Stowell offers this suggestion, which does help somewhat: Highlight your text. Type Command-L and Command-comma. You are now set to type in your link. Press Return. Command-semicolon makes the document window active again but your new link is still highlighted. So click the right arrow key to setup to continue typing from that point. Using Find When I click the Find button from the Find window, it shifts the active window from Find to whatever document I am searching. This means if I want to click the Find button again (or the Replace button or whatever), I have to click twice. Once to reselect the Find window and again to click the button. (A partial work-around: Command-G works as a shortcut for re-pressing Find.) Also, if I select Find when the Inspector window is open and overlapping the Find window, Find becomes the active window but not the frontmost window. It is still partially hidden behind the Inspector window. It is necessary to move the Inspector window out of the way. The bottom line again is that simple actions require more clicking and moving around than should be needed. Spell checking The spell checker needs some work. You can not use it to check just a selection of text. Also, it sometimes gets confused when checking a layout with multiple tables and cells, either displaying the page incorrectly or not checking what you requested. Temporary files If I get a system crash while GoLive is open, I typically wind up with a bunch of GoLive temporary files in the Control Panels folder.