Adobe Muse - HTML websites without writing code

http://muse.adobe.com/

by robin_reala • 15 years ago

20 23 15 years ago

muse.adobe.com

pavlov3• 15 years ago

From the FAQ: "Muse is an Adobe AIR application."

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.

mtogo• 15 years ago

Nope, AIR still sucks on windows and is unsuable on everything else.

chippy• 15 years ago

Great! I was really missing Frontpage.

modernerd• 15 years ago

From the intro video:

"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.

Meai• 15 years ago

What I would really appreciate, is a graphical designer similar to the WPF designer, just for CSS. Muse is far from that, as far as I can tell, there isn't even a way to provide percentage values for boxes.

kristaps• 15 years ago

Why would the app running on AIR pose a problem?

schraeds• 15 years ago

Because most if not all AIR apps have non-standard interfaces that feel clunky, slow, and out of place on Mac OS X.

jamesmoss• 15 years ago

The markup generated from this tool isn't so good (no surprise). e.g <p class="paragraph">

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.

pavlov3• 15 years ago

That's akin to someone saying back in 1988 that, instead of building a graphical tool like Illustrator, Adobe should have invested in educating designers how to write PostScript by hand.

("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.

extension• 15 years ago

Writing clean HTML is about a lot more than performance. It's about compatibility, maintainability, future-proofing, accessibility, and so on.

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.

Tutorialzine• 15 years ago

And yet we are discussing this on a site that uses tables for layout and <font> for styling. I also enjoy beautiful markup, but outside the web development community nobody cares. What is important is that it looks good. After all, people are still impressed by flashy animations.

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.

dsadsa• 15 years ago

first thought: oh another Microsoft Frontpage.

PeterMcCanney• 15 years ago

It's interesting that the pricing model is purely rental. I can see a lot of small businesses/hobbyists using this. $20 to get your website done will grab a lot of attention.

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...

Maci• 15 years ago

Funtip: Turn off javascript, render navigation and other elements on "Muse" based pages non-functional.

The lack of any meaningful fallback is disappointing. Accessibility to content should at all stages be a priority.

RexRollman3• 15 years ago

You're right. Far too many sites depend on Javascript and Flash to function. In my opinion, sites that can't function without those are broken.

keeganpoppen• 15 years ago

So what is the non-intellectual-purity argument for why Javascript dependency is bad? I've heard people talk for years about why it's so important to support noscript, but tbh I feel like this is the year 2011-- the internet is not (only) a set of hyperlinked documents any more, and javascript is an essential part of the experience on many/most non-trivial websites. (note: not trying to troll; I'm honestly curious)

simonhamp• 15 years ago

Wait so instead of building the tool people actually want, Adobe is spending the profit from their ludicrously over-priced products on this!!?? And at the same time trying to perpetuate the pointless Air ecosystem...

Bye Adobe http://scrumpy-jack.com/post/543705069/bye-bye-adobe

RexRollman3• 15 years ago

Personally, I prefer a text editor, but I recognize that is not the solution for everyone.

Adobe Muse - HTML websites without writing code

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