Adobe Systems Inc, which announced the acquisition of GoLive Systems Inc at the beginning of this year (CI No 3,568) is launching Release 4 of the web-based design tool today (Monday). Renamed Adobe GoLive 4, the product ships next month for the Macintosh platform, priced at around $300. But Adobe has moved quickly to make sure the product is also available on Windows- based PCs, and that version is expected to ship during the second quarter of the year. Unlike Adobe’s existing PageMill web design tool, GoLive is aimed at the professional end of the web publishing market, and includes content management software for tracking and organizing the various HTML files, images, plug-ins and PDFs that go to make up a web site. The tool can be used on existing, as well as new sites. GoLive 4 now supports Microsoft Active Server Pages in addition to pure HTML, and its underlying database has been moved from proprietary technology over to XML. Sam Hui of Adobe says the tool uses many of the same user interface features found in traditional page layout packages, so that designers don’t have to learn new ways of operation from scratch. GoLive was founded in 1996 by Andreas Polza, who previously founded German print editing software company P.ink, and the research and development labs are still based in Hamburg, Germany.
