And you thought Hollywood was rough. Faster than Lindsay Lohan can say "Self destruction," Adobe's Creative Suite has brought in a fresh face, Dreamweaver 8, in preparation for tossing out that ratings loser, GoLive.

The updated Creative Suite will be called version 2.3 and probably will ship in November 2006. By that time, version 8 of Acrobat should be available, so it will replace Acrobat 7 in the Premium suite. The rest of the line-up will remain untouched until next year's Creative Suite 3, which will include major updates to Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Creative Suite 2.3 Premium will set you back $1,200 ($160 if you're upgrading from CS2; $550 if you have CS1).

An Inevitable Facelift
No one should be too surprised by the shakeup. Though GoLive (once called CyberStudio) has always been an interesting application, Macromedia's Dreamweaver has long dominated the Web design market. When Adobe swallowed Macromedia last year, it was only a matter of time before Dreamweaver shoved GoLive out of the Creative Suite spotlight. (Insert cry of "Catfight!" here.)

The company says it will continue to develop GoLive as a standalone application. Sounds like relegating a troublesome actor to infomercials to me. My hope is that Adobe radically retools GoLive for Web design beginners. Adobe abandoned that market when it stopped making PageMill, an early WYSIWYG tool that, while easy to use, generated bloated code and couldn't keep up with the Web's fast-growing sophistication.

Acrobat's Had Some Work Done
Last week, product managers of Acrobat 8 and the Creative Suite briefed me on the creative pro-oriented features in version 8. I liked the simplified user interface, which should make this jack-of-all trades app a little easier to manage. The simplicity is especially welcome given the technical nature of some other changes: preflighting tools that now automatically correct problems; expanded PDF/X creation and validation; and JDF validation of InDesign files. It also looks like Acrobat 8 will be better suited to the collaboration and review process, though I have yet to try the beta and be sure.

FreeHand's Looking for a Good Agent
FreeHand has never been part of any version of the Creative Suite, and I don't think that's going to change. Illustrator has the lion's share of the vector drawing market, and besides, it's Adobe's baby, whereas FreeHand is from Macromedia.

Officially, Adobe says it will continue to support FreeHand and develop it "based on our customer's [sic] needs." I'd call that a network executive way of saying that FreeHand is doomed.