Web design workflow between Dreamweaver, Muse and Reflow?

There is specific workflow using all three of these programs. Muse and Reflow are definitely targeting different workflows. Muse is specifically targeting a turnkey solution where you publish straight from the tool without needing to do any coding. Reflow is targeting a workflow where Design and Development are two separate tasks. They could be done by the same person or a designer working in conjunction with someone taking a design and turning it into the final production html. For Dreamweaver, it can be the tool you use finalize the design from Reflow into your production HTML, or you can use any other text editors or tools you'd like.

I like the designer-developer workflow intention of Adobe reflow. That is what all of us as designers have been looking out for. But what am peeved about in RF is the development pace. Just two pre-releases. Secondly instead of looking towards illustrator-reflow workflow the team is looking at photoshop-reflow. I hope Adobe has not forgotten Illustrator is vector based. Photoshop is pixel based. SVG is supported in modern browser and efficiency that illustrator brings.

Whe are we having widgets support? Slideshows, lightboxes, forms etc or is that a developer workflow? Export production html supported in all browser ie8+. When is phonegap integration coming,etc

We usually drop builds with new features to pre-release every two weeks. Our aim as a team is to be able to drop builds publicly every month. There have been impediments blocking us from accomplishing this goal and we're working hard to close it out.

Exporting production HTML for all browsers is not something we're looking at in the short term.

Form elements, components, style management are all features that we're actively discussing and prioritizing. And your feedback counts, so keep it coming.

Cheers,

Anirudh Sasikumar

Developer on Reflow

Hi,

Our next update is going to be on 6/17 with the rest of the Creative Cloud launch.  Unfortunatly it is a bit longer than we would have like, but we should be back to our normal schedule soon.

In this update we will be enabling a copy/paste workflow with Illustrator to help you design using SVG.  Hopefully you will find it useful.

Widget support is something that is coming, but further out.  Even when we launch widgets, I don't expect we will support ie8+ browsers.  There are several different plugins/widgets that you can choose from for production uses, Reflow's goal is about creating designs and expressing responsive behavior.

Thanks!

Jacob Surber

Reflow Product Manager

Will the new release/update include a feature to navigate?
I'm sure you all know that RWD is not all about one page.
How about ways to interact with the design? Clicking? Navigating to another view or screen?

Thanks!

I most agree with Rahzah, is this feature coming with the release? Linking to pages and export to production HTML.

Hi Rahzah,

Multiple pages is not going to be in the next update, but will be in the following.  We are going to enable Reflow projects to support multiple pages in a single file.

Clicking and navigation are things that we will look at in the future.

Thanks.
Multiple pages would be great!
Another one I see many people asking about is the ability to "Name" the boxes. Box. Box, Box, Box, is not too intuitive.
I am also going to suggest maintaining the "Layer" and "Group" concept as in Photoshop to soften the learning curve for new users.
I currently have boxes that are NOT grouped, but behaving like a group if I try to move them. Kinda frustrating.

More How-To videos would also be nice with the next release in June. Which I'm excited about!

Thanks.

I'm extremely excited about the June release!  It's going to be huge!

One of the features of this build is the ability to name elements in the Elements Panel or on the DOM bar across the bottom of the screen.  These names propagate the html and CSS that are created in the background, hopefully making things easier to understand.

You can current convert Boxes to Groups by clicking on the icon in the the elements panel, DOM bar or edit menu.

More instruction is something we are working on as well.  The challange's of being a small team

Unless I'm missing something, I agree that this focus on Photoshop-as-website-creation-tool is bizarre. I mean, what? Photoshop has to be the clumsiest way to create anything (and I do mean anything,) hands down. Who are these so-called designers using Photoshop to build their designs? What design school is teaching their students to use Photoshop on anything other than photos? Seriously.

It's aggravating that Adobe insists that we funnel all of our Illustrator designs through Photoshop just to get them into the Edge apps or Muse. Why is it that copy and paste (which may or may not give satisfactory results) is our most direct option? It just seems so unrefined and poorly planned. Very disapointing from a powerhouse like Adobe.

From everything I've been able to search — on workflow — there is no clear-cut easy step to prototype what you want in Reflow and dump that CSS or HTML (preview) somewhere, where you can tweak later.

Ideally, this is where a bridge from Reflow to Muse or DW could exist.  Where RF can bundle multiple widths of responsive design, Muse could ingest them on Desktop, Tablet, Phone.  That kind of integration would require a shared framework, which we can see probably won't happen.  But if there was some hook to shortcut all this to the app (DW?) that exports the final code, you'd have a sweetspot.

My 2 cents.

I wish Muse was more like Reflow.

For example, though I know Muse is for more novice users that are looking for an easier way to create fun animated designs, I think that being able to use Muse to easily create parallax animations and movements and then, somehow, make it export to html that can be then brought into dreamweaver to add more functionality.

Maybe even create a responsive design in Reflow then bring it into Muse to add awesome animation and then finally into Dreamweaver to do extra code, functionality and publishing.

Just a thought.

RocketRon,

If you preview your Reflow design in the browser, CSS, Html etc. files are created and put in the assets folder. After, you can open the html in dreamweaver.

I'm a hybrid designer (at least a wannabe) and developer (heavy coder). The best workflow I've developed at this point is:

1. Design layout, etc. in Illustrator
2. Export Illustrator as a PSD (layers and text are preserved, with minimal extra empty layers)
3. Generate the Reflow file in Photoshop
4. Design the responsive pages in Reflow, HTML is auto-generated (the HTML and images generated are pretty clean)
5. Design forms, add JS and server-side code to the project (keep the JS in a separate file to minimize work involved in design changes, re-generating files, etc.)

The problems with this workflow are:

1. Step 2 is extraneous, and if you modify the original layout in Illustrator, you must do it again
2. I would prefer to only use Photoshop in the mix when dealing with photos or complicated masks or something
3. A little more control in Reflow over file naming of the generated HTML, CSS and JavaScript files would facilitate a non-destructive workflow when linking and exporting between the different apps.
4. Adobe "app juggling" has been a long running problem for me. On my 13" MacBook Pro, resources are a bit limited, and running Illustrator, Photoshop, Reflow and Dreamweaver at the same time doesn't leave an adequate resource pool available. Perhaps a Reflow extension for Illustrator could prove more synergistic liquid layout design possibilities.

My motivation for using (read paying for) Adobe products is improving the speed of website design and development. Before I discovered the CC updates, I was honestly ready to give up the subscription. The CC updates to Dreamweaver made it possible to consider it for coding use (CS versions didn't even honor the OS X go-to-end-of-line keystroke). CS6 saw the removal of a complete 'Save for Web' feature from Illustrator, and it becomes time consuming to go and copy the generated HTML from the preview. Reflow seems like a step in the right direction for generating HTML and CSS that honors the designs as actually seen in the design app without a lot of extra, unnecessary steps (creating and managing slices and re-typing text, pasting code snippets here and there to assebmble pages).

I definitely welcome any suggestions on the workflow!

I created an html text and image slider composition in Adobe Muse then decided I really want to learn Edge Reflow to have a more responsive site and import the CSS created there into Dreamweaver. But I really like that content slider! Is there a way to bring the composition I created in Muse into Edge Reflow?

On the other hand, perhaps that content slider won't be responsive enough in Edge. If not, is there a good tutorial on how to create a responsive content slider in, say, Edge Animate to bring into Edge Reflow? What I love about my composition is that the user decides when they are ready to move to the next slide -- it doesn't change automatically before they have finished reading. I'd be starting from scratch in any Edge product but it's worth it if it saves me time doing the website eventually. (My website is 100 pages and I'd hate to have to do it 3 times to get a semi-responsive version in Muse.)

Hi @skaras2,

There is no solution at the moment to take assets from Animate or Muse and use it in Reflow. You can just use static images , text and boxes to design in Reflow. We appreciate your feedback though since we are actively working on improving these tools.

Thanks,

Joan

Hey,
currently i'm working with muse, degenerating my html and css knowledge, because muse animation and scroll features give me an advancement in UX design. But unfortunately all the sites lack responsiveness, there are some features for that in muse but they happen to be pretty rudimental. Thus limiting the work with the main animations and scroll features, so still there is the whole UX vs. UI problematic. My question now without considering edge reflow nor dreamweaver, the first for its lack of potential in UX creation the latter for my lack of coding experience, will there be a focus on fusing reflows responsiveness approach with muses approach on UX advances, so that i am not only able to show and tell about a certain design but also preparing it without spending an eternity to rewrite the code in DW?
or tl,dr :
Will muse experience more advancement in its ability to create responsiveness?
a frankenstein from muse and reflow seems to be something i could appreciate the most in grafic web "development".

thanks in advance

I like muse the most, so easy to work with

JoWiKr nailed it. I have been using Adobe Muse for a week now and i have been searching for widgets that gives me responsiveness in muse. Will there be an update later down the road to make muse actually responsive?

Thanks much.

PLEASE ADOBE READ BELOW, and fulfill this designer wish

Edge Reflow is really amazing. It's an huge tool to create responsive webdesign. Insanely great, fun and designer oriented! I love it!

Muse is really terrific. Amazing. Another huge tool to create website for a designer! I love it too.

But the question is:  why you in Adobe waste time and smart developers to develop a single app like Edge Reflow instead integrate it natively in MUSE ????

I think Edge Reflow app is a not sense. Really!

Build responsive website in Edge Reflow is great, but you can't add animation, plugin etc.

Build a website with html 5 animation, plugin, etc. is astounding in Muse but you can't build a real responsive website: only useless and ridiculous versions for tablet, phone, to point to specific url...things of 10 years ago...).

What the sense to have the useless Muse's Tab "Desktop" "Tablet" and now "Phone" if they don't control the main website (read responsive)?  They are useless. It's like a Ferrari with the pedals instead an engine. Who use these tabs to build a website? Do we really need to build three website version and point these to http://www.myawesomesite.com/ http://phone.myawesomesite.com http://tablet.myawesomesite.com/ and drive specific version with JS.... in 2014 ??? Come on.

My wish:

These useless Muse's tabs should be replaced with the interface pieces of Edge reflow (the stretch system to determinate the size is really amazing). They are awesome and wonderful. After complete the job by adding some Muse's panels to replicate Edge Reflow functions.

No more "app juggling", tons of time saved, the best software ever to build website. The new version name? MuseReflow. Of course. Sounds good isn't it?

Come on guys fulfill this designer wish. Maybe for Christmas?

Please

Thanks

Though not affiliated with Adobe, I'll venture a guess that Edge Reflow and Muse are geared toward different markets and that's the primary reason for not combining them into a single package.  We did some research on evaluating various Adobe apps, which all work really well for a particular type of projects and workflow scenarios - Muse, Edge, and Parfait - but there's such difference in targeted user it would be pointless to mash them all into one.

I'll be completely honest, I hope Adobe does NOT intergrate Muse and Reflow AND I hope they don't integrate Muse with phonegap. I know, all the designers are reading this like,"are you kidding me?!" but I have good reason.... As a designer FIRST I would have loved if everything was to be basically automated in the web so I literally don't have to know ANYTHING about web or coding but realistically, I'm tired of our profession continuously being looked as expendable. If you want the access in being able do responsive design, jquery, bootstrap etc... GO OUT AND LEARN IT! Stop begging Adobe to make a single platform for you to use that covers everything and be a real work horse (as sooo many say they are) and learn how to code! It takes time, effort and determination but if you have all of that, you can do it!

Why wait to expand your skill set?

I don't agree Matt. The tools are there to make our lives easier.

I don't want to waste time coding. I'd rather use that time to tweak my design.

I love Muse but haven't used Reflow yet. I might just give it a try.

Please ADOBE, create buttons for edge reflow responsiveness or allow integration between muse and reflow. Thanks!!!

you might be right, but seriously, "coding"( more like scripting ) is pretty darn boring, not really hard to learn but really boring. also using Muse without proper script and code knowledge is always futile, so no problem for you and your boring elitism, it is just a help to get big chunks of script in no time.

There are a lot of potential for Reflow. Now its possible to open Reflow project in other applications like Edge Animate and DW and  continue edit it But , true there is a lof thing that must be added to Reflow, if we are going to do it backend one.

Ares