Creative Toolbox

Macworld has posted a follow up story stating that Adobe plans on continuing support for GoLive and FreeHand, despite reports stating otherwise. Here are a few excerpts from the post that I find particularly interesting:

Adobe plans to continue to support GoLive and Freehand and develop these products based on our customer’s needs.

(The emphasis on the word “support” is my doing. I just find the choice of this word interesting as opposed to using the word “develop”.)

Clearly Dreamweaver and Illustrator are market leading…

Macromedia applications that Adobe is evaluating for Intel support include Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Flash Basic, Fireworks and Contribute.

Be sure to read the entire post to get the complete context, but I’m getting the impression that this is Adobe’s attempt at letting us down easy.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade, but the title of this post is “Adobe: GoLive and FreeHand development will continue”, no where in the post does the Adobe representative specifically says this. Instead the representative says, “Adobe plans to continue to support GoLive and Freehand and develop these products based on our customer’s needs”. Supporting products and continuing to develop them are two very different things in my mind.

What I suspect Adobe is planning on doing is offer transition features in Illustrator and Dreamweaver for longtime FreeHand and GoLive users. Features that would allow for easy import of existing FreeHand files and GoLive sites. This along with bringing over popular features in these products to help migrate users to the “market leaders”. Hopefully we’ll see FreeHand’s Auto Shapes show up in the next Illustrator and Dreamweaver gets GoLive’s Smart Objects and refined UI.

You can see this sort of “continued support” in the relationship found between PageMaker and InDesign. PageMaker 7.0 is still available to buy although it hasn’t been upgraded in years and InDesign can open PageMaker files and now even offers a PageMaker toolbar. PageMaker is now considered the right tool for business publishing while InDesign is “a new standard in professional layout and design”.