I’m still here…

…but I’m distracted. For the past several days I have been trying to make sense of a new program. Many years ago I bought a Web design program called GoLive CyberStudio. It was the first program that used a true WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface to design a Web site. Later on, the Adobe people bought the program and made it their own, thinking that since most Adobe customers were using Photoshop and Illustrator, which are programs aimed at visual thinking types, GoLive would fit in perfectly. The problem with GoLive was that it created some pretty sloppy code; it was heavy and dense and made Web pages that were very large and slow to download. So Adobe bought the geek’s delight, Macromedia Dreamweaver which was used by more designers than GoLive. After a couple of upgrades, Adobe decided to abandon GoLive. Soon it fell behind the current standards for Web site creation. I was left with an orphan.

Dreamweaver is for geeks. Adobe tried to soften it for creative artist types, but so far the softening hasn’t worked, at least not for me. This is not a program that you can launch then figure out how to use without some heavy indoctrination. In order to keep the user interface simple and clean, Adobe removed all clues as to how to use it. At least that’s my assessment. Perhaps there is the factor of me being a geezer that can be a problem, but so far this thing is as opaque as all get out.

Suspecting that I could be flummoxed by the program, I bought a video that Adobe produced which explains everything step by step. Supposedly after mastering the contents I can become an Adobe Certified Associate, an expert in Adobe’s eyes on the use of Dreamweaver. There is a problem, though. The two women narrating the video who drone on about how to use the program can drive you up a wall with their speech mannerisms, like one who ends each sentence as if it were a question? And their assumption that you already know the meaning of many of the HTML terms like alt and div and td?

Adobe lost my respect when they introduced a filter in Photoshop that allowed you to stretch and distort an image. They labeled it Liquify. I immediately wrote to them and said the correct spelling was Liquefy. They never responded. Almost a decade later, it’s still Liquify. Even though the dictionary that accompanies many of their programs tags the word Liquify as incorrect.

Oh well. Carry on.