We were sad to see the official announcement, last week, that Adobe Muse has ceased development.
Let’s be honest. This Adobe decision is going to create a hardship for Muse designers, who do not code. There’s been a great deal of anxiety already expressed about this Adobe announcement. Many users of Muse create great websites for clients. Those Muse designers are justified in feeling abandoned by Adobe.
Adobe will continue to support its very designer-friendly app, for web/mobile projects, into May 2019, but after that, it’s pretty much entering the history books of Adobe web/mobile EOL (end of life) apps.
It is our hope that over the next 14 months, before Muse support closes, Adobe will provide a solution, which allows Muse users to cleanly migrate their projects to another Adobe app.
Your Muse app won’t stop working, but will it be useful? What happens is that browser apps are improved and computers and mobile devices get OS (operating system) updates. Older Internet creation apps are then not equipped to keep up with the newer technology. So, using Muse, this time next year, might create something which has poor user experiences.
We’re not new to this Adobe EOL thing. When the Internet was young, Adobe created a PageMaker like app called PageMill, which we enjoyed. PageMill’s 1.0 version launched November 1 1994. Later, Adobe dropped PageMill and acquired GoLive. During the 2005 Macromedia acquisition, Adobe sent GoLive to the graveyard in favor of the far more popular Dreamweaver.
So, how many websites do we have out there which we designed with Muse?
Zero.
For us, and many web/mobile professionals, Muse was a great tool for doing fast prototypes of sites. We do the heavy lifting with Dreamweaver. One of the downsides to Muse was that it was not practical to drop that prototype work into Dreamweaver and finish the project. The code which Muse generated was not as sleek and elegant as what Dreamweaver creates. The Muse code was quite “verbose” and could cause very involved websites to load slower than they should.
However, we felt a certain ownership of Muse. When Adobe was pondering the development of Muse, we were the first people they interviewed about it, to get our feedback on the idea.
The Muse UI (user interface) grew out of InDesign. It would be our dream to have some of the Muse UI become a great new feature set in Dreamweaver. (We’re not holding our breath on that one, though.)
So, how will we prototype things, now?
Admittedly, we have not been big fans of Adobe XD. It needs more love. Fortunately, the captain of the Muse ship is joining the XD team, so we have a feeling some good things are about to happen for XD. If a XD prototype project could migrate right over to Dreamweaver, that would be a huge plus for designers and make the lives of coders much easier, too.
Without a doubt, Adobe has made a mess of things for its users of Muse. In our minds, Adobe has about a year to make it right (sooner than one year is better).
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