Generating lots of excitement, and getting better with each rev:
With this Beta 7 release, you can expect incredible improvements to performance and a significantly more streamlined workflow for previewing and publishing your sites, plus a host of bug fixes and enhancements. Muse will also be part of the upcoming Creative Cloud Membership! For a complete list of updates, visit the Muse Beta 7 blog post.
Incredible? I don’t see much difference. Muse is a fair 1.0 effort that doesn’t even provide a simple spell check. Muse-generated menus don’t work correctly on IOS browsers. Adobe Air doesn’t work well with Wacom tablet clicks so Muse needs a mouse or other input device.
I’ve been using Muse off and on for several versions, and it has improved surprisingly slowly. It can’t do search & replace within text fields, and although I happen to love AIR, I find Muse to be surprisingly slow as a site grows beyond 10-15 pages (on a rather fast PC). Site updating is a big nuisance if you’re not hosting your development on Business Catalyst, and in my work that’s often the case. But my biggest concern is the pace of development. It seems to be much slower and less complete than I would expect from Adobe, and I can’t shake the feeling that this is a low priority project with insufficient tech staffing. I love the site layout mechanism, but when a site gets large, the graphical layout of pages becomes pretty much unusable. I still have high hopes for Muse, but I’ve had to move to other quick-development tools in the meantime.
I have to agree with the other comments. I, too have noticed the menu bugs (you can’t even Cmd+Click to open in a new tab in Safari on the official Muse site), some less than optimal non-intuitive interface design (especially the pre-designed widgets like slideshows etc.). I also expected development of the Beta to go much faster, especially since it was announced that it was gong to be a subscription product where features would get released when they are ready.
During the Beta period, there were very few new features added (unless you count Business Catalyst integration, which only a fraction of people are ever going to use). No glyphs panel, no “Fill with Placeholder Text”, no panel docking/grouping, no scrollable area divs, no shape tools, no decent code editor for placed HTML, no real control over exported images, nothing. It certainly feels like the team is too small to produce a tool that could be classified as production ready when it is going to hit 1.0.
What’s worst is that the new update wants to connect to the internet all the time and locks you out of the application without warning unless you give it an Adobe ID. I usually only permit my web browser, mail client, newsreader, Skype and Dropbox to connect to the internet, everything else should stay offline unless it has a very good reason to do so. There is no reason design software should transmit data or force online registration. Illegal users who want to steal software will simply download a crack from a dubious site and patch these things away. It is the legit users that have to deal with this nonsense all the time.
The AIR interface also doesn’t exactly make for good usability (the made-from-scratch panel system is rather rigid and close to unusable on a laptop, the interface controls react in a slightly laggy way even with only a small document open and always somehow manage not to act like their native counterparts where you least expect it etc.).
I am also a bit sceptical about the choice of Flash/AIR as a development platform. Flash is going to significantly decrease in significance over the next few years. Integration of web and print publishing is going to increase. I’d much rather have seen the software built on top of InDesign and integrated with the whole workflow and interface, maybe even the InCopy workflow.
Don’t get me wrong, this product has a lot of potential. But right now, I would hesitate to use it in production on something bigger than a 6-page small site for a local business.
I am a bit sceptical too: Flash is going to significantly decrease in significance over the next few years.
The issues with Adobe muse are real and should not be ignored. I was using Adobe Muse 0.8 for my project. Now It is blocked with the project whch cannot be retreaved. I am expected to bu it online by chosing a sales point in my country (Kenya) and yet it is not in the list of the countries provided. There is no provision for me to fill my country.
What do I do and my project is due for presentation?
The wesite Ipublished did not publish photos and slides.