Muse 2017.1 Release – New Feature Overview
After a long wait I'm excited to share that you can now download a new major release of Adobe Muse with some great features. Here's the MuseThemes roundup of what's new, along with a video overview sharing some tips and suggestions for working with the new release.
Note, August 24, 2017 – some users have reported issues with the new version, and recommended staying on the old version of Muse until updates are available. If you wish to rollback your Adobe Muse app to an old version, you can use the following method:
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Responsive Native Widgets – Compositions, Slideshows and Forms |
A native widget in Muse is one that is built by Adobe and included with the application; these received a big upgrade in the new version. All of the major native widgets are now fully responsive, including the Composition, Slideshow, and Contact Forms.
To take advantage of the responsive capabilities, simply apply responsive sizing / pinning controls to elements and watch them scale with the browser. All of your existing native widgets will continue to work as before, so you can decide when exactly you'd like to revise them to take advantage of responsive.
We're very excited about responsive native widgets in Muse. MuseThemes has a massive library of native widgets that we've pre-styled (we call it our "design series"), however without responsive behavior they were not very useful for our users. And since only Adobe can modify the behavior of a native widget, we had no ability to improve them.
With this update, all of our previously built native widgets can be easily used in a fully responsive site – hooray! We will have more beautifully styled native widgets coming your way soon, so stay tuned.
Check out our design series widgets here:
https://www.muse-themes.com/collections/adobe-muse-widgets/design-series
Note – we've been told that converting the native widgets in Muse to responsive was a HUGE undertaking for Adobe, so we're grateful to see this completed. Thank you.
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Double Clicking "Nested" Elements |
When working with native widgets or state buttons in Muse, you often need to click multiple times to dig down and select the correct element. This gets old really fast, and I always hoped there would be a better way to quickly select the element you need.
In this new version you can simply double click on any sub-element, and it's instantly selected. Much easier!
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Speed / Reliability Enhancements |
As a pre-release user I've been working with the new version of Muse for a while, and I've noticed a major improvement in the speed of the app. Large files open faster, file manipulation feels leaner and more streamlined, and Export HTML / publishing seems quicker.
This may not be a flashy new feature, however when you use a tool every single day and it gains even a small increase in speed, the time savings really begin to add up.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
This is a great Muse release for a variety of reasons. First, the lack of responsive native widgets felt like a huge barrier to building a completely responsive site. Now that this is checked off the list and nearly all of the tools and features are fully responsive (...scroll effects) I'm hopeful we'll begin to see new features added to the application.
Second, this release opens up our entire library to responsive use. As I mentioned above our selection of pre-built forms, sliders, and compositions is quite extensive, and many of them require very little adjustment to use in a fully responsive site. Native widgets have some handy features like dragging / dropping photos and selecting an entire folder of images – this isn't possible in custom coded third party widgets.
Finally, it's been quiet in the Muse space. This year has been slow for new releases, and I've heard some users questioning Adobe's investment and commitment to the app. This major release shows us that Muse is still going strong, and now that the native widgets received some love hopefully we'll see upgrades to the third party widget system us developers use... ;)
Thanks and enjoy the new release!
~Steve
View the official Adobe release notes: https://helpx.adobe.com/muse/release-note/adobe-muse-release-notes.html
Comments
This is the update that we’ve been waiting for!
Thanks, Steve. Well done as always.
Thanks for the awesome news.
Great Overview of the new features. Thanks, A lot!
Super excited to see this come across. Continue to appreciate what MuseThemes brings to the table – updates, additions and tutorials are great – but this is a GAME CHANGER! Well done!
Thanks for the update. Although Facebook is ablaze with comments on issues with the new responsiveness updates breaking already established sites. I have been told to wait on updating . . .
Steve, Many thanks (more than 50 but less than a hundred) for this breaking news. If you have a minute––well, you don’t, of course, but let’s pretend you do––what do you anticipate the next Muse upgrade will include…and what do you feel the next upgrade should focus on? Again, thank you (okay, that now exceeds my hundred thank-you limit).
Thank you for introducing this. I won’t get stress for clicking!!
Thanks for the overview and how they relate to your widgets.
Thanks for the comments everyone!
Re: bugs in new version – we found the build fairly stable, but it’s impossible to say for sure with any brand new version. The safest thing to do would be to install the latest pre-release version (museprerelease.com) and try it out. That way you can run both the old and new versions of Muse at the same time. Nearly all of our testing was done on pre-release, since the new version has only been available since 9pm last night.
Thanks for the update Steve.. Are menus now responsive?
I hate to say this, but this build has a nasty bug that has to do with how fullwidth text boxes get pushed down when other elements are above them. I have deinstalled the update for now.
Adobes response in the thread on Museprerelease.com:
I see what you are talking about now.
Text frame that is set to stretch to browser width is not getting proper height. If I replace your red text frame with a rectangle with same settings, then there is no issue.
Workaround to make the original text frame scenario work is – add an extra invisible element (let’s say rectangle), that has the same height as text frame, and having same color to blend in. Set it browser top left pin. This will make sure that text frame gets proper height and all other elements will render correctly.
This new version has a problem with pinning items to top of page, it’s causes the image below to not show full image, i have been working on this problem for about 3 hours now, I pull in some older sites that have pinning a they are not lined up properly!
Thank you, Steve. I feel like you always have my back!
Muse Themes ROCKS!
Great overview.
-Thanks!
You guys are awesome! I really appreciate your good job and I get used to work with your products. But, unfortunelly, today I need to relate issues between some current widgets and the new Muse 2017.1 release. Since I’ve upgraded, things have gone weird. I was using 3 widgets together on the same website: Media Gallery Pro 2.1, Social Sharing Group 1.0 and Headliner 2.0. All of them are OK in the Design Mode, but are not rendering properly in all responsive breakpoints, both in the Preview Mode and when the site is published. Please, check the current widgets. Thanks a lot!
Stay away from this muse version for now. It’s crowded with bugs and issues, that with highest probability will destroy your imported project’s look and behaviour of the existing elements such as forms and pinned widgets.
I repeat. STAY AWAY from it!
Yeah, this version is full of problems that break existing sites. Thing that sucks is that I reported these issues during the beta/preview cycle and apparently no attention was paid to them. The 2017.1 release behaves exactly like the last preview version I tested more than a month ago.
My advice is stay way until future updates are released.
Unfortunately, I didn’t realize 2017.1 had installed and ended up doing bunch of work on a site yesterday that I’m now having to redo in previous version. Fun!
Hi all, Steve,
Have you notice something wrong with the Trace SVG widget since the update?
I can confirm that on a site (finished 2 week ago just before the new version) when there are more than one SVG being trace on a page, all instances are being duplicated. (it just doubles all of them).
anyone else have this issue?
Hope you understand what i am trying to say.
(my english can be strange)
yd.
Thank you!
Thank you!
The WORST update so far. I have never had a website which was pretty much destroyed by an update. Adobe should be wrapped over the knuckles for releasing this version.
Thanks for the update! It’s nice to get a synopsis of new features like this.