Review: Adobe codename: Muse
Today I’m going to review Adobe’s new project codenamed: Muse. It’s currently in open beta testing and free for everyone to check it out. It’s geared to designers so they can spend more time designing and less time coding. Sounds great right? Lets see how it worked for me!
To start off with I thought a redesign of my site was the perfect opportunity to see what Muse had to offer. First things first, lets get this started.
If you are familiar with Adobe products this looks pretty similar to the screens you’ll find in Dreamweaver for example. I already started my project here so lets click on that and move along.
Interesting thing about Muse is you start off with the “Plan” screen. This lets you plan out and organize your site’s pages and even wire frame them out. The “master” page down at the bottom lets you plan the overall styles or layout you want to have on your site. The changes you do on this page will effect the entire site. Makes it really easy to make site wide changes. Honestly it took me a tutorial to figure out what exactly the “master” page was for. Once I got it, however, it was easy to use and actually made complete sense. Of course the “master” page effects the entire site!
Here we have the “design” phase of Muse. Notice the light pink/red columns? Muse will let you choose a grid system to use in your design. Here I went with a 12 column grid. This page is the Master page, here I set up the basic layout for my site; background, text, header & footer information.
Now this is the design view for my index page. It’s different from the other pages because it has 3 different content areas, the other pages will only have 1. Because this isn’t the “master” page the changes I make on this page will only effect this page. You may also notice the menu on the right side. It’s very similar to the menus you will find in Photoshop or Dreamweaver. It gives you options for the font, paragraph, and even link styling. Link styling wasn’t as intuitive or customizable as I’d like however. From what I saw (I didn’t look up a tutorial on this part so I might be missing something) you could pretty much only customize the link colors & if you wanted them bold, italic or underline. Muse also has the option to use built in widgets, such as slide shows, image galleries, or menus. All the widgets are customizable. If that’s not what you want you still have the option to enter your own HTML code, as I have done here with Twitter’s code.
This is the Muse preview phase. It lets you preview your work as it would appear in a browser. To Muse’s credit it was right on. Open this site in Firefox & IE and it looks just like that! No only does it look like what your site will be when it’s live but you can also click all the links, use all the photo galleries or other special items on your site.
All that’s left is to publish your site… This is where Muse kinda lost me, and might loose you too.
That’s right you have to sign up for something! “Business Catalyst” in the trial version (which is what you sign up for here) lets you load your site to their web space for free. They also email you stats about your site, and show you some of the perks of having your site there, likes it’s easy for you to show to clients, and get feedback on it. Well that might be great for some, but I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have it on my own web space. I can just as easily send a client a link to my web space as theirs. Fear not, you don’t have to sign up with another services you probably don’t want or need. There’s another way…
Go in to File then down to export as HTML and you will get a nice folder of your site, just waiting for you to upload to your host of choice! I did that and now have a lovely copy of my Muse site. Until you export at HTML your site will be in Muse format, and only usable by Muse, so that might be a problem for some folks. Once it’s exported you can edit the HTML & CSS in any editor of your choice as you would any other site. Speaking of code, how does it look? Well, like this….
This is from my index page. As you might notice that’s a lot of code…and a lot of divs. I’m fairly certain you don’t need that many divs to do the same thing. The code isn’t as clean as I think it could be and probably would be if it was coded by hand. So what’s my overall opinion on Muse?
Well I think Muse has potential. Once I got over it’s learning curve (which isn’t a particularly huge curve but it is there) I found it pretty easy to use & I didn’t like the final code, it wasn’t clean enough. However I found myself wishing I could do more with it. Maybe that was because I was still learning it, or just limitations of the program. It is still only in beta right now. The final product will probably have more functionality. I should also note that there has been an update since I last used Muse. I haven’t checked the notes to see what was changed, so there may be a Muse second look review to follow. I look forward to seeing what Muse is fully capable of when it’s finally released. If you’d like to see the site I made in Muse here it is.
Have you tried Muse? What did you think?
Hi dude! I really value what you’re posting here. Keep posting that way.