Fig. 20: The styles panel lets you preview font styles and apply them with simple checkboxes.[an error occurred while processing this directive]"Superior Adobe integration"
I'll admit that I had somewhat of a "gimme a freaking break" moment while reading Adobe's marketing copy regarding GoLive's support for the other Adobe CS products. "Superior Adobe integration?" Whatever, dude. But, considering how a big part of why I was curious about GoLive in the first place was to see how Adobe managed to make everything play nice together, I was willing to give the marketing mavens the benefit of the doubt for once. Anyway, the BS detector did not serve me well this time, because it's really cool how the other CS products fit together here. GoLive makes extensive use of what it calls Smart Objects, which allow you to place native files from other CS applications directly into GoLive. The main advantage of using Smart Objects is that once you've placed another Adobe file type into GoLive, it keeps track of the source file and automatically generates out Web-ready images based on your defined export options. Here's a quick rundown of how each CS app fits into the picture:

Photoshop/ImageReady
Place a Photoshop Smart Object in the layout, and you're instantly presented with the familiar ImageReady Save for Web dialog box (fig. 21), where you specify what format and settings you want in the Web version of your image. The crop and resize features, of course, apply to Photoshop files as well. Additionally, you can also exchange rollover states and HTML code with ImageReady.


Fig. 21: Look familiar?

Illustrator
The Illustrator Smart Object allows you to convert AI files to normal images, or as vector-intact SWF or SVG files (fig. 22). Again, if the source file changes, GoLive will automatically re-save the image in the target format.


Fig. 22: GoLive auto-converts Illustrator Smart Objects to several Web-friendly formats.

Acrobat
If it's an Adobe product, you can imagine that there is some PDF capability built in. GoLive CS makes use of PDFs in a couple of different ways. In addition to being able to view diagrams in PDF format (as discussed earlier), you can easily create a PDF preview of whatever page you're working on (fig. 23). You can even open existing PDF files and edit links within them without having to have Acrobat handy (fig. 24).


Fig. 23: Any page can be saved as a PDF.


Fig. 24: Need to switch a link in an existing PDF? No problem with GoLive.

InDesign
This is such a cool feature, it almost makes me wish 1) that I knew anything about print design and 2) if I did, that I was an InDesign user. InDesign CS sports a "Package for GoLive" function that bundles up all of your print document's assets and allows you to create sites from them just by dragging and dropping in GoLive (fig. 25). It's one of those things that I played with a lot longer than maybe I should have, considering I have no real use for it. But just imagine how useful it would be for folks who are actually looking for an integrated print-to-web workflow.


Fig. 25: Adding InDesign assets to a Web page is, yet again, as simple as dragging and dropping.

The bottom line here is other than the fact that the Smart Object feature adds a tiny bit of garbage code to your pages (fig. 26), the integration with other Adobe CS programs is pretty excellent. Maybe not "superior," but it's definitely not just hype.


Fig. 26: The proprietary "livesrc" tag — a small price to pay for the flexibility of Smart Objects.



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