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There will be an alternative for Adobe Muse

Explorer ,
Mar 28, 2018 Mar 28, 2018

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I think there will be an alternative for Adobe Muse.

The business modell just fails. Everything is about money.

A lot of other companies make good widgets, only Adobe had to make that in the software. The software by itself had not much potentional, the widgets filled the gap.

So i think, and hope more, they will be come with something new soon.

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Explorer ,
Jun 08, 2020 Jun 08, 2020

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Okay, everybody, I know I'm late to this forum. But I just read through the full 2 pages of replies since the announcement that Muse would be discontinued. Here are a few general thoughts:

-  Many posts mention Webflow as a good alternative. If you go to their site and look at the bottom of the first page and follow the "pricing" link, you will see the cheapest basic hosting is $12/month ... if you pay annually.

-  I just redesigned my own website about a month or so ago. Brand new. Used Adobe Muse. My host works out to less that $4/mth., including the domain.

-  I am a university professor who manages a Mac lab with Adobe subscriptions. Taught my web design course (a BFA in Graphic Design program) using Muse as soon as it was available and for as long as it was. Students completed their personal portfolio sites and had time for a tablet presentation for interviews. We barely had time to complete sites in a semester previously with the frustrations of Dreamweaver. Those students interested are taking electives in our computer science department to learn HTML and CSS, etc.

-  So it comes down to this: the Adobe subscription gives us the following that we use regularly: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign. Less regularly: After Effects.

-  Affinity now has comparable apps for the top three: Designer, Photo, and Publisher. Apple has Motion and Final Cut. I have now purchased Affinity's 3 solutions for my own Mac and am very happy. And, I actually prefer Final Cut and Motion to Premiere and After Effects. Muse was the last hope for the continued Mac lab and faculty subscriptions, in my mind. We are now considering a switch. (BTW, we also require every major to subscribe to Adobe CC. This switch would also affect this requirement.)

Not trying to be vindictive here. Just wanted everyone to have another path to consider.

Respectfully,
Kerry Jenkins

 

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Community Expert ,
Jun 08, 2020 Jun 08, 2020

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Kerry,

FYI, Adobe Portfolio is free (includes hosting & unlimited pages) with a paid Creative Cloud Plan.   New users can literally have a working site up and running in 20 minutes. The online editor is dirt simple to use, no web or coding skills needed.  And Adobe Portfolio ties in seamlessly with Lightroom as well as Behance -- a social venue for showcasing creative work online. I invite you and your BFA students to check it out.

https://portfolio.adobe.com/

https://help.myportfolio.com/hc/en-us

 

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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Explorer ,
Jun 08, 2020 Jun 08, 2020

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Nancy,

 

Thank you, yes, I am aware of Portfolio. I played with this some time back and felt that the templates were limited. The beauty of Muse was that the students could create their own designs and not have a homogenized look for their own sites. Our other design professor has settled on Wix for the course, although I feel the proprietary hosting is pricey for the students long term. I asked her about falling back to Dreamweaver, and two transfer students immediately said, "no". So as my previous message above shows, we are still exploring options.

The concept of XD is more enticing and I see that as a much better match to what we were accustomed to with Muse. But not only can you not publish that work, even getting a reasonable export or output at print resolution to present in class (or to clients) is not possible. Due to the lack of output or publishing, Photoshop or Illustrator are better for prototypes. Especially if the intent is to pass on assets to developers.

 

The beauty of Muse for a design student is that they were able to address responsive design, SEO, file sizes/formats, even analytics ... with the end result being a working responsive site on the web. Students could then graduate with a host of their choosing and a personal domain listed on their stationery systems. And even if they couldn't do a lot of coding, they would develop a thorough understanding of the processes involved for when they work with developers.

Finally, the overall premise of Behance to me is for designers working on projects who want client or peer input along the way. And I think this is a good thing. But a personal, unique portfolio website has a more professional impact. Again, this is just my opinion, but I have been in the "hiring seat" on many occasions.

I understand that the original objective of John Warnock was to pursue avenues to aid graphic artists and designers in their work. (In fact, I recall the story of rounded-corner rectangles and technical pens.) Discontinuing Muse to me was a step away from that path.

I feel that graphic designers should have all the skills necessary to produce unique solutions for themselves, clients and employers without relying on others to take over portions of projects. The Adobe suite of applications--including Muse--provides the required toolset.

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Community Expert ,
Jun 08, 2020 Jun 08, 2020

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I don't disagree with what you say but have a slightly different point of view.

 

Where I live, designers are expected to have coding knowledge with examples on GitHub.  Designers who don't know code are considered illiterate.  That may seem harsh to anyone coming from the "wait-I-never-needed-to-work-with-code-before" spaceAnd I get that.  But innovative apps & products aren't built by tools alone, they're built by talented people who know what they're doing.  Seasoned users of Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign all understand that scripting know-how is what separates the pros from amateurs. 

 

Muse was inspired by InDesign and had great appeal as a quick prototyping tool.  Unfortunately, the code base wasn't extensible.  But that didn't stop the marketing dept from selling Muse as the next great web solution for graphic designers who can't code.  Almost from its onset, Muse was doomed to fail.  And so were many folk who used MU exclusively to make a quick profit off their small business clients.

 

Notwithstanding Muse's reliance on 3rd party widgets for enhancements, it was soon eclipsed by products that embraced modern Flexbox, Grids, Srcset, Lazy Load and other essential web technologies that MU can't support but which site developers and stake holders want.  Adobe dropped the ball with Muse and Dreamweaver both.  The difference is DW can survive as a code editor & management tool.  MU is a dinosaur trapped in a tarpit.

 

XD?  It's hard for me to take XD seriously because it can't generate code.  And while the 3rd party add-ons claim to generate code, the ones I've seen so far aren't worth a damn.  Show me one designer who can work with code and I'll show you 20 XD users who can't.   Enough said. 

 

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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Explorer ,
Jun 09, 2020 Jun 09, 2020

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Thank you, Nancy, for your point of view. And as you introduced with your response, I must also say I don't disagree. I would welcome the chance to discuss this further as it relates to curricula. If that is something you would consider during this "quarantined summer", let me know via email [personal email removed by moderator] and we can pick a time at your convenience.

Thanks in advance,
Kerry

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Community Expert ,
Jun 09, 2020 Jun 09, 2020

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This forum has a private message system.  I just sent you a PM.

image.png

 

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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Community Beginner ,
Jun 21, 2020 Jun 21, 2020

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I think it was a foolish decision for Adobe to discontinue Muse. If anything it should have kept being further developed as it really is the way forward for most businesses developing professional websites. There is definitely a great opportunity for a software developer to pick up where Adobe left off on this one and the decision by Adobe to discontinue Muse may prove to be it's Achilies heel. I wouldn't hesitatre for a second switching my Creative Cloud membership to a competitor if they had a suite of products that included a very similar product to Muse. Does anybody know of one?

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Community Expert ,
Jun 21, 2020 Jun 21, 2020

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Desktop web page generators like Muse and its defunct predecessors -- GoLive, MS Expression Web & Front Page -- are gone from the radar for a reason.  They outlived their usefulness.

 

If Muse could do what modern web designers need (Single Page Web Apps, dynamically generated content, progressive enhancements and support for frameworks), I might agree with you.  But it can't do any of that.  Muse is so irrelevant now, it's unfit for purpose.

 

With regard to Muse replacements, what's available today falls into 3 basic categories:

  • Text/Code editors  -- Brackets, VS Code, Atom, Sublime text.
  • Visual code editors  -- Dreamweaver, Wappler, Pinegrow, Bootstrap Studio...
  • Online site builders  -- WordPress, Webflow, Squarespace, Wix...

 

Modern web designers use a combination of skills and tools for different tasks. 

 

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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Explorer ,
Feb 20, 2021 Feb 20, 2021

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Hi, Nancy,

 

I wanted to add to your list of Muse replacements above: Sparkle Pro. I have only created one site so far, and just desktop and tablet sizes (still need to try the smartphone version). But it definitely serves my purposes of wanting to design a site from scratch, rather than using a handful of templates. And it practically has the ease of a page layout app. The final plus is I can publish the site directly to my host of choice (like I could do with Muse), or I can export to HTML and use FileZilla to send wherever, rather than being tied to Wix or Squarespace hosting/rates.

Now with three Affinity apps and two from Apple, I can create all I need for myself and my clients. The elimination of Muse was the push I needed!

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Community Expert ,
Feb 20, 2021 Feb 20, 2021

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Hi @Prof. Jenkins,

Does Sparkle (not to be confused with Adobe Spark) work on Windows?

 

 

 

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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Explorer ,
Feb 21, 2021 Feb 21, 2021

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Hi, Nancy,

 

Just Mac, I think. In fact, I believe I read somewhere that one of the developers used to work for Apple.

 

My personal website: 

 

https://kerryscottjenkins.com/

 

... was updated early last year in Muse.

 

But I have one project on the site that is really a separate site for my typography course. It is created with Sparkle Pro:

 

https://kerryscottjenkins.com/type

 

Very basic as I put that together too quickly. But Sparkle does add in Google Analytics, steps you through SEO on each page, and allows export to HTML. It also has a developer function for a separate one-time fee.

 

But the export to HTML option would also allow further development if desired. Sorry, that sounds like I'm a Sparkle sales rep! Not the case, but I am happy with the app and the main developer is very quick to respond with support. 

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Community Expert ,
Feb 21, 2021 Feb 21, 2021

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Since I don't use Mac, I would have no interest in but I'm glad you found something you like.  🙂

 

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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Community Expert ,
Feb 28, 2021 Feb 28, 2021

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it's not like the exported sites will break.

============

Wrong! Web browsers are constantly changing.  But Muse has not been updated in more than 3 years.  Muse generated code is outdated and already beginning to fail in some browsers and mobile devices.  Keep using Muse at your own risk.  Nobody will rescue your site when it fails.

 

Best advice, stop using Muse now before you're forced to.

 

-- Adobe Behance (free) - https://help.behance.net/hc/en-us/articles/204483894-Guide-Intro-to-Behance
-- Adobe Brackets (open source) - http://brackets.io/
-- Adobe Dreamweaver CC - https://www.adobe.com/products/dreamweaver.html
-- Adobe Portfolio (free with a paid Creative Cloud Plan) - https://portfolio.adobe.com/
-- Bootstrap Studio - https://bootstrapstudio.io/
-- Pinegrow - https://pinegrow.com/
-- Squarespace - https://www.squarespace.com/
-- Visual Studio Code (open source) - https://code.visualstudio.com/
-- Webflow - https://webflow.com/
-- Wix - https://www.wix.com/
-- WordPress (open source) - https://wordpress.org/

 

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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New Here ,
Jul 14, 2022 Jul 14, 2022

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I miss GoLive

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Community Expert ,
Jul 14, 2022 Jul 14, 2022

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LATEST

Is this a time warp? GoLive hasn't been around since 2007. 

 

I can understand being sentimental about old songs but not obsolete software from more than a decade ago. 😕

 

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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