My den has dried sufficiently, it would seem, for me to get back to my main 'puter. I only have 18 days left on my GoLive demo, so I'm pretty pissed that the flood robbed me of 1/4 of the evaluation time I get on account of shelling out th big bucks for Adobe CS (standard) last year. When I upgrade, I need to know if the extra $200 for the 'premium' version is worth it. You get Acrobat Pro (don't really need it, I can annotate and edit the shit out of PDFs with software I already have) and GoLive for the extra dough.
GoLive, for the uninitiated, is Adobe's answer to Dreamweaver, the darling of web developers. Macromedia has done a great job on the web side, from Cold Fusion for high end developers to Dreamweaver, Flash and the other programs they've folded into the Macromedia suite. But it was a survival move on their part. They've never had a page layout program that could go head to head with Quark, PageMaker or InDesign.
Adobe rules the print world as far as I'm concerned. I know Yorkist Rose is probably shocked by that statement, but it's true. Only in ad agencies and newspapers where slave wages are paid to relatively green artists does the Quark/Mac hegemony remain in force. And there's cracks in it even in that sphere. InDesign 1.0 was a joke, but they did their due diligence and came back with a 2.0 that surpassed any page layout program out there. Quark still hasn't caught up with that version of InDesign (I have access to both at work, because we have what amounts to an in-house service bureau that supports everything from Word and Publisher to real graphics programs on both PCs and Macs). And InDesign CS (a.k.a. 3.0) adds even more functionality.
Oddly, with CS, they broke a lot of web-based features like animated GIFs out to ImageReady, though from what I hear, with CS2, there's less and less reason to leave Photoshop, which leads to the notion that eventually, Adobe will just sell one, does-it-all program. You already have drop shadows and other Photoshop effects available in InDesign (though you have to know your way around or it will RIP for shit). Converting text to outlines and draw tools, most of the stuff you'd go to Illustrator for can be done in InDesign, and the list goes on. Illustrator has a lot of Photoshop elements these days too. The ultimate would be a program where you could WYSIWYG edit a whole campaign: newspaper and magazine ads; a newsletter; ad specialties using offset, screen, dye sublimation and embroidery; and a web site, all off the same source files, repurposing with appropriate resolution, trapping and other considerations as you've defined in your preferences.
So far, with GoLive, I've learned a lot of CSS code I didn't learn as my eyes glazed over in textbooks on the subject. But I keep going to the 'source' screen and hand-coding stuff, and really, why spend $200 if I'm ging to do exactly what I can already do in EditPlus, a $30 shareware program I already have a license for?
I can do animated GIFs out of ImageReady, Flash exports out of Illustrator, and killer image maps out of either. Plus, all the Adobe print programs have SVG interactivity that boggle my limited understanding of JavaScript already. And GoLive, as a WYSIWYG editor, doesn't exactly live up to the acronym.
I drag a column of type to size, I expect a program like GoLive to assign the div-code or make a table or whatever it needs to do to make what I've told it to do happen. I can apply style sheets, but I have to know what their structure is, how they work, in order to do it.
Anyway, late for bed, and I have a big day tomorrow. Family time, my novel, my web site. I've been abusing my stepbrother, using him as an accountability partner for Wealth Effects by reading chapters aloud to him. It's unfair to him because he can't walk out of the room, can't even really talk back. But he's a great editorial assistant, because reading to him, I hear all the things that clunk in my manuscript.
Plus, he gave me a whole other set of ideas (silently) about ways to present the story. For years, I've been committed to telling it all from three first person narratives, and I don't think it's going to work that way. I'm not going to do unlimited third person, but I'm either going to add narrators (it'll end up reading like 'As I Lay Dying' without Faulkner's brilliance if I do that), or I'll have to either mix limited third with the first person narratives. Or maybe I should write it from more than three limited thirds, I dunno. The point is, a whole bunch of ideas have become clearer reading my book to Todd.
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