Adobe Muse

Adobe recently announced a public beta of it’s latest offering for web designers, Muse. After trying it out I have a some thoughts, most of which are similar to Elliot Jay Stocks. Here are my issues:

<li>Muse runs on Adobe Air. That’s a dealbreaker.</li>
<li>Let’s just say the code it outputs is not very clean.</li>
<li>How will this work with a CMS? The answer is that you will still need a developer to take anything made in Muse and make it work with a CMS in order to have a dynamic website.</li>
<li>It feels like iWeb Plus.</li>
<li>Tells designers that they do not need to understand how the web works. It is a detriment to a designer to not understand their medium.</li>
<li>Hides the fact that not all browsers will render websites identically. Why not leverage Adobe’s helpful <a title="BrowserLab" href="https://browserlab.adobe.com/en-us/index.html" target="_blank">BrowserLab</a>?</li>
<li>It can’t be responsive. Everything is based upon fixed width layouts. This is not where the web is going.</li>
<li>Will likely lead to websites that are very image heavy and a burden on bandwidth. Understanding CSS allows the designer to leverage styling instead of dozens of heavy images.</li>

It is not too much to expect designers to learn HTML & CSS, these are the tools of our craft. Why hide them? This app seems perfect for one thing, restaurant websites. It’s the new Flash.