I’m back to report on my time with Muse so far. Yes, I know it’s a subscription and a lot of you will discount the thought of using it because of that (and the fact it’s Adobe), but here goes, only bmy thoughts on a new programme for me.
As I’m sure you’re well aware because of my previous posts, I like Adobe - there. I’ve said it - and my whole working day is taken up with Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, so I know their general feel and tools. Muse sits nicely into the family.
I’ve now been using it on and off for about 2 ½ weeks and I’m really liking it and getting along with it. Initially it’s like a drag n drop Freeway, only more stable, and this will get results. However, using things I’ve learned from Freeway I’ve added to the initial simplicity and just understood how things work, by working in text boxes and doing some stuff inline. It’s a very wysiwyg application to use, breakpoints are easy to adjust and in the working window you can see pretty much how your finished page will be at various sizes and you can adjust accordingly.
You can also set up the responsiveness in 2 different ways, the first being that all of your boxes will respond dynamically and smoothly as the browser window resizes, or a more static version where the content will ‘jump’ to the next responsive sizes as your browser window gets there. Or you can mix and match throughout the site.
Then you have the myriad of Widgets (Muse’ version of actions) to add and enhance. I haven’t delved too deeply into these yet, but ones I have tried seem to work pretty well. As yet, there’s no CMS that I know of, but I have had limited success with their In Browser Editing (which in itself is limiting to what you can edit). Sometimes the changes ‘stick’ sometimes it tells me I don’t have permission to upload the picture, but generally working ok for simple edits.
I don’t think you can do as much with it as you more professionals could with Freeway, but for me it’s fine. You have the option to add bits in the Head area, add snippets of html markup and it’s generally user friendly. You can tell they’ve spent a lot of time on the UI to make it as intuitive as possible.
Because of Muse, I’m going to try and get more web work, as the workflow will be quite seamless between the family of products once I read the instructions!
For me it’s a keeper, and once a proper CMS is available, my life will be complete, sad sod that I am.
Out of interest, and only for playing and getting my head around bits, I’ve redone 2 personal websites, not great, but a very good learning curve for me, so you can see a limited version of what can be done. They took about a day and a half each to do.
I’m not associated with Adobe, I just like ‘em!
regards
Trev
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