It's got the usual assortment of tool palettes and features familiar to all Adobe Creative Suite users, including character, paragraph and graphic styles and color swatch palettes. There's text wrap with user-defined offsets, but I couldn't get that to work in my beta.
Bafflingly--and the company has done this before--Adobe leaves out align and distribute tools in this version. Somehow, early versions of Adobe software frequently drop this capability into the "nice to have" rather than "users will beat us with rulers in protest" bucket. For basic interactive content and navigation, Adobe supplies some widgets (Spry and jQuery, if you care) which in their beta state still feel a bit glitchy to work with; for example, when trying to select widget "previous" and "next" text in one of the slideshow widgets it instead goes to the previous or next image. You'll still need to know how to customize the colors via coding or diagnose errors, because Muse's code "editor" is just a basic text editor. No support for any type of web fonts. As for Preview, it's just an embedded Webkit browser that renders individual pages. You have two choices: export to HTML or publish directly to Adobe's Business Catalyst hosting. HTML export supports complete overwrite or incremental export. You can download it at http://muse.adobe.com/.
Adobe has released a beta for its Muse website creation tool, which lets designers make sites without coding using a drag-and-drop system.
Code-named Muse, the tool uses Adobe's AIR to let designers make websites using familiar tools, rather than learn to code. Designers simply create the page in a drag-and-drop system, inserting text, images and other features, and then export the HTML file to be hosted anywhere.
The system includes tools to make site maps, define properties such as link colours and page width, manage images and text, and build-in HTML or third-party tools such as slideshows or Google Maps.
Although it does offer integration with Photoshop - changes made in Photoshop or Fireworks are automatically reflected in Muse - users won't require Adobe's Creative Suite to use the AIR system.
While it's now available for free download as a beta, Muse won't be free to use. Muse will only be available via subscription. Adobe plans to charge $15/month for an annual subscription, or $20/month without the annual commitment.
Muse is expected to be launched in early 2012 and Adobe said it would rename it before then. Adobe is working on sorting out a few bugs in Mac OS X Lion, but said as AIR isn't supported on Linux, Muse won't show up on Linux-based OSes.
Adobe has launched its latest web tool intended to democratize establishing an online presence, Muse, which claims to allow complex HTML sites – with HTML5 and CSS support – to be created as easily as if being laid out for print. Currently in beta, Muse borrows UI and layout concepts from Adobe InDesign, with drag-and-drop menus, slideshows and other widgets that require no coding skills to implement.
Instead, it’s a case of making the page look great, and relying on Adobe’s web-elves in the background to do the clever stuff. Sitemaps are organized with straightforward flowcharts, common design elements set up using a straightforward “Master Page” system, and site-wide basics like size and colors can be handled with little fuss. Adobe Muse is available in beta today as a free download from muse.adobe.com. Sites won’t expire if you stop your subscription, however. It will also work with Adobe’s Edge HTML5 app, released earlier this month.