There are definitely rumors, at least.

That certainly wasn't the feeling by many who used Adobe LiveMotion. As with GoLive/Dreamweaver, LiveMotion was viewed as much friendlier and easier to use for graphic designers, while Dreamweaver was considered a tool targeted more towards coders. Although LiveMotion did include scripting capability, as least in version two. Probably the reason it failed to gain traction was not due to any lack of features and capabilities, but rather not enough marketing by Adobe. If Adobe had truly wished to gain market share from an entrenched product like Flash, they would have needed to really push LiveMotion. Of course, the argument is moot now that Adobe purchased Macromedia. Hopefully Adobe can now incorporate the best of LiveMotion’s features (such as the intuitive timeline, with the ability to change the fps without losing the position of keyframes, etc.) into Flash.

GoLive also features a split pane for WYSIWYG and code editing.

jarrod, thanks for the link.

christopher,
i'm sorry if my comment on livemotion seemed a little harsh. i really didn't mean to convey it that way. in my experience, livemotion was not a fully developed product, and that can be attributed to the fact that the program is/was still in its infancy. for anything beyond straight keyframe animation (i.e., anything that involved scripting), livemotion was so unpredictable and buggy for us that i couldn't see it standing a chance in a deadline-oriented development environment. i'm sure most of these issues would have been cleared up by version 8 (which is what flash is on now), but as you said, flash was already entrenched in the interactive workplace, and based on my experience, a nicer ui and improved bitmap handling (tho flash 8 has really made some huge improvements here) were not close to enough to have designers and developers learn a new, less robust application to do pretty much the exact same thing.

and let me add that i thought i thought livemotion was actually marketed pretty brilliantly from the get go. when a company of adobe's reputation claims it has the "flash-killer" app, people take it very seriously. i remember the pre-release rumblings and excitement in the offices i worked at. and it actually got people to open the app for a few days to give it a shot. but, as far as i'm concerned, it just didn't have the legs.

That's fine. Obviously you found it didn't work for you. Since LiveMotion only reached version two I guess it couldn't be expected for it to have the capabilities of Flash.

I have used both, GL and DW.
DW hands down is a better program.
WYSIWYG, handcode, tables, CSS, client server, tons of 3rd party support/products. Plus you can really set DW up to your taste.

BTW, Illustrator now has very nice bitmap tracing, way better than FH or flash.

In the past the rule of thumb was MM for web, Adobe for everything else.
(I have always used PS, that's what I learned 1st so I never used FW).

Reality is, it's not so much the tools, as it is the hand using the tools. So take all this with a grain of salt.......

I own both DW and GoLive and DW is certainly the better of the two. For strict coding (PHP and ASP) I prefer to work in NotePad++ (free - just search for "notepad++" in google - availble as a SourceForge project). Its syntax highlighting is a little better than DW, IMO.

As far as discontuing FreeHand - I feel quite certain we won't see anymore updates for it. The last update was version 11.0.2 in February 2004. It shipped with Studio MX and saw only two minor updates (bug fixes) for Studio MX 2004. It wasn't even included in Studio 8.

Maybe we'll see CS3 include Flash 9 and DW 9 and get rid of GoLive ;)