GoLive Now Dead[?]

From Macsimum News:

During the Adobe Live event, Robert Raiola of Adobe Systems France said that Adobe will halt the development of Freehand and GoLive.
[...]
The canning of Freehand and GoLive is no big surprise. Since Adobe purchased Macromedia, the company had two illustration packages (Freehand and Illustrator) and two web design apps (GoLive and Dreamweaver) in its repertoire. As these products were previously competitors, it seemed likely only one in each category would survive.

Erm... GoLive? What in the bloody hell is that? you ask. (Sorry, just finished listening to the Engerland v Hungary World Cup warm up game, and I'm feeling a lil' blighty.) Well, back in the late 90s, it was Adobe's answer to Macromedia's Dreamweaver website-building software. And it was the first book that I ever got authorship credit for--Real World Adobe GoLive 4. My friends Glenn and Jeff gave me the opportunity and I wrote about the introductory first quarter of the book (full of user interface basics) as well as a chapter on working with multimedia (I think... I'll have to dig out my copy).

The best part about writing my portion of the book was that I got to do a good chunk of it while on the road visiting my Mom down in the bucolic village of Morpeth situated in the wine-growing Hunter Valley region of Australia (about a 2 hour drive north of Sydney, and similar to the wine growing region of northern California--in fact, if you ever get a chance to sample wines from the Pepper Tree vineyard, do it!) I spent many afternoons hanging out on the back veranda of one of the local eateries, Millards, with a large French press of coffee at my side and looking out onto the Hunter River drifting by. Now that's the way to write a software book!

I hung around for the book update for GoLive 5, but was feeling on uncertain ground about my life. I just didn't do as good a job as I knew I could do while in the midst of changing course from freelancing to a full-time job at Amazon. And I vowed afterward that I'd never get involved in writing another tech book (a vow that lasted only until 2004, when I did the update for Jeff's Palm Organizers Visual Quickstart Guide--another technology that's fast approaching redundancy). But my coauthors are probably grateful that I've moved on, due to my habit of including gnomes in illustrations.

[UPDATE] Check the comments for some real tech journalism--gracias, Glenn! (Still, it was a fun stroll down memory lane...)

[PS] A travesty! From the BBC Magazine's Ten Things We Didn't Know This Time Last Week:

Rule 2.25 of the Chelsea Flower Show regulations bans entrants from including garden gnomes in their displays. Bunting, balloons and flags are also banned.