Adobe Muse - HTML websites without writing code
muse.adobe.com
muse.adobe.com
"Muse is a tool for the graphic designer. And I mean that in the most sincere sense."
I downloaded the demo. For me, it's defined by the absence of a source code view. That said, the Muse site itself is built with the app, which is impressive, but must have required incredible patience. The code it outputs is less than impressive: the body code begins with six nested divs.
At $15/month, it may find an audience among keen hobbyists, though. Professional graphic designers I know who've expressed an interest in web design have all drifted towards Dreamweaver or taught themselves to hand code sites from scratch, and I'm not sure that Muse is enticing enough a toolset to break this trend at present. If they're trying to appeal to graphic designers (typically Mac users), the fact that it's an Air app is likely to be a big hurdle for adoption.
For professionals it could be a good mock-up tool. Being able to quickly show a client a website and alter it in real-time is going to save a lot of time, even if it means having to recode the entire site from the ground up.
Client's for the most part don't really care what's going on under the hood, just that their site looks super sexy.
Which of course will lead to this tool being abused by every half wit who can draw a straightish line with a ruler. <p class="paragraph"> all round...
I'm not convinced that AIR is good enough for large desktop apps. It's been a while since I've checked out AIR's progress, though -- maybe my prejudice about AIR is behind the times.
The lack of any meaningful fallback is disappointing. Accessibility to content should at all stages be a priority.
With javascript it's not a document, it's an application.
If you are writing an app, then sure, use javascript, and don't worry about it (even if you could do it server side, I rarely see the point).
But if you are writing a document then you should at least have a fallback, and reserve javascript for less important "flair".
Bye Adobe http://scrumpy-jack.com/post/543705069/bye-bye-adobe
Adobe should spend their time and money investing in a resource for designers to learn and perfect HTML/CSS/JS techniques rather than building useless tools like Muse.
("Processing cycles on the printer's raster processor are incredibly precious! Can you imagine, this printing job would easily run 70% faster if only the PostScript document were hand-written instead of produced by some junky layout tool...")
99% of designers will never write code, no matter how exciting educational prose and tutorials we may come up with. It's a shame to drive away those designers from the web just because of old-fashioned HTML snobbery.
History has shown us repeatedly that these sorts of wysiwyg programs write really bad markup, which is a symptom of their pretending that HTML is capable of things that it is not.
That was unavoidable because HTML wasn't capable of doing the kind of layout that designers wanted. This was back in the late '90s, when the demand for WYSIWYG web design tools boomed but the HTML standard was splintered by incompatible vendor-specific extensions.
We can do much better now; hopefully Adobe Muse does.
Sometimes I wonder if aligning our values with those of ordinary people wouldn't yield better results than thinking up uses for the <aside> tag.