Review: MenuMachine

An Adobe GoLive SDK Extension for Creating Popup Heirarchical Navigation Menus

By Paul Vachier, April 04, 2002

One of the coolest features Adobe came up with when they introduced GoLive 5 was an SDK (Software Development Kit) designed to allow third-party developers to add their own customized features into the GoLive application. For the more technically-minded, this SDK consists of some APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and a constantly evolving Object Model (the GoLive Object Model, or GLOM), accessible via a very JavaScript-like scripting language. This SDK lets programmers access key features of GoLive and extend the application beyond how it ships out of the box. What this means is that third-party developers can now build things like new feature sets, commands, menus, palette objects and more utilizing a relatively easy-to-use development environment. In fact, many of the new features introduced by Adobe since GoLive 5 have been developed using the SDK and quite a few third-party developers have joined suite. These new extensions take the form of Extend Scripts, which can be activated simply by dragging certain files into GoLive's Extend Scripts folder and relaunching the application. With the release of GoLive 6, the SDK has matured into a robust and powerful tool with greatly expanded capabilities which developers are only now beginning to discover.

All this sounds well and good but it doesn't serve the average Web designer unless new extensions prove to be useful and compelling additions to the GoLive arsenal. Enter Rob Keniger of Big Bang Extensions, one of the premiere SDK Extension developers and long time GoLive power user. Rob's latest creation is an SDK Extension called MenuMachine, a fabulous feat of programming and interface design that allows folks to easily add popup heirarchical menus to their Web pages. It turns a normally complicated and code-intensive task into one that is simple and easy to modify. Talk about a useful extension! On the next page, you'll see an example of a menu system created with MenuMachine, and learn more about this very cool tool.