Adobe launches public trial of Muse web design tool

15 August 2011

Companies & suppliers

Adobe has unveiled a new website creation tool, codenamed Muse, which allows graphic designers to create websites via familiar Adobe tools, without coding.

The product, which is available via a free public beta trial until its commercial launch in early 2012, uses Adobe's AIR cross-operating system runtime environment to allow designers to create websites via a drag-and-drop interface.

Adobe's AIR runtime, which combines HMTL, JavaScript, Flash and Flex technologies with ActionScript and any text editor, can be downloaded for free along with the Muse beta.

Lea Hickman, vice president of Design and Web product management at Adobe, said: "The ability to build websites as easily as laying out a page in InDesign is one of the most popular requests from our design customers."

Muse allows designers to combine imagery, graphics and text, in a similar way to InDesign. It provides drag-and-drop customisable widgets, like site navigation menus, while users can add fully customisable interactive elements including slideshows.

Site layout is planned using a sitemap, which allows users to design the flow of the site by creating parent and sibling pages to define different sections and to maintain design consistency via the use of style sheet-esque Master Pages.

According to Adobe, the beta version of Muse can "only create a subset of all the possible websites"; however, that is expected to change as it looks to enable the creation of websites for mobile platforms, such as smartphones and tablet computers.

"Today Muse is a great tool for creating websites with high quality visual design and no CMS integration," the company added.

When the product begins shipping next year, under a new brand name, it will be priced on a subscription model that Adobe said would allow it to improve the product quarterly, rather than via its usual upgrade cycle of 12, 18 or 24 months.

"New features will be made available when they're ready, not held to be part of an annual or biannual major upgrade," Adobe said. "This will enable us to stay on top of browser and device compatibility issues and web design trends, as well as enabling us to respond to feature requests and market changes in a much more timely fashion."

Subscriptions will be available at a monthly rate of $20 (around £12) or $180 for an annual subscription (equivalent to $15/month).

For more information see muse.adobe.com