Rob Keniger develops Extensions for Adobe GoLive, and runs Big Bang, a Web Agency in Brisbane - Australia. I met him and his wife Janet in Paris this summer. We strolled along the river Seine and in Saint Germain chatting about a "secret project we're working on which we can't disclose the name of" and suddenly it was happy hour so we escaped from the heat by walking into a bar on the Champs Elysees where I asked Rob a few questions about his work. In the photos, he's on the left.

Didier

Rob, you've developped some fine extensions for GoLive.

Thanks, they've been well received in general and I enjoyed making them.

Many of your extensions are aimed at making GoLive better or easier to use, what points would you like fixed and wich are your favourite GoLive features?

Most of the features in GoLive work pretty well for me. I would like to see improvements in the way CSS styles are applied, since in GoLive 5 there is no way to directly apply styles to objects such as form fields. As a developer, there are also many improvements to the GoLive SDK that I would like to see - in particular the ability to integrate better with the site window which is not currently possible.
I am also interested in seeing more robust support for dynamic sites, especially those based on PHP. The current Dynamic Link feature has never quite lived up to its promise and I hope that Adobe is planning to dramatically improve it for the next version of GoLive. Even better would be the ability to control Dynamic Link with the SDK - that would allow the creation of some amazing extensions!

Can you tell me more about your future actions?

I am particularly interested in making tools that assist users in their day-to-day workflow rather than in creating special effects actions. The GoLive Software Development Kit gives developers like me the tools to totally transform the GoLive application and make it much more powerful.
Expect to see a tool for working with CSS in the near future, in particular to assist users in taking older sites with HTML 3 font tag-based markup and making them fully CSS-aware. It's a pretty cool extension. I also have a Meta tag manipulation extension in the works which should be useful to those people who need to add and edit meta tags.

So far, you have been giving away your extensions, do you plan to carry on?

Some of the extensions I have planned are fairly sophisticated and take up a lot of development and support time so some of these I may have to charge a fee for, however I will continue to develop and release freeware extensions too.

What's your background?

I began my career working for print publishing systems integrators before I saw the original Mosaic web browser and became hooked on the new internet medium. I worked for a variety of small and large companies implementing internet systems and along the way discovered GoLive CyberStudio, a revolutionary application which opened my eyes to the brave new world of WYSIWYG HTML editing. As you know I now run Big Bang Solutions which is a small Web development company located in Brisbane, Australia. We design and implements custom web applications for a variety of companies around the world.

Do you see yourself as a webdesigner or a coder?

I am not much of a designer, although I am technically proficient with all the various design apps. Most of the work I do is server-side and JavaScript coding. Our web applications are written in PHP/MySQL these days - thus my wish for a GoLive Dynamic Link for PHP! Most of our design work is actually done by my wife Janet.

Please list 5 of your favourite sites.

That's a hard one. Most of the sites that I like I like for their content more than anything. Since I'm not really a designer I will concentrate on sites that I use regularly:
I like to read Mac news and by far the best news site is www.macsurfer.com.
One of the coolest web apps I have seen would have to be the Solar System Simulator at space.jpl.nasa.gov. Extraordinary.
Google is the only search engine worth using. I love its simple, uncluttered interface - it is no wonder they now own the search engine market.
www.dictionary.com for when I need a big word to look important :)
I keep a high-tech aquarium and www.thekrib.com is the resource for fish geeks.
And www.toysrgus.com because it reminds me of being a kid :)

And now some sites developped by BigBang.

A couple of recent ones: www.janegrealy.com.au www.delineationgraphix.com A lot of the work we do is either back-end stuff or "fixing" of other people's HTML/sites, we have picked up quite a lot of clients this way. I have spent a lot of time recently building custom GoLive extensions for a number of companies including Adobe.

What music do you listen to when developping...

Anything and everything! A lot of Australian music, like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Spiderbait, the Go-Betweens. The Pogues. Michelle Shocked. Some European stuff - Daft Punk, Air.
And I have an extensive collection of bad 1980s MP3s which drive Janet crazy :-)

While Rob ordered a secound round of nice and fresh beers I stole a photo of one of his projects displayed on his TIbook, do you see what I see?

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