Great Value for the Money
Written: Jul 13 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Free, low learning curve, instant scripting
Cons: Minor editing problems, no tag auto-completion
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| hurkle's Full Review: Eversoft 1st Page 2000 |
Although I've been spending the last month-and-a-half coding C++ with no end in site, I swear that my real job is developing web sites. Such is the life of a consultant. And what else do consultants have to contend with when they're at a client site?
It's hard to get your own phone. It's hard to get a good PC. And it's really really hard to get good software if the client doesn't already own it.
At my last site, we developed web sites. Lots of them. And you know how we built them? We telneted into a Linux Box and used pico (a command-line text-only editor) to create all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Java.
Now, I'm as retro as the next person, but when you're working in a rapid application development environment, you gotta be able to whip the code out (well, okay, HTML isn't really code, but let's just assume it is for the sake of this review). A good HTML editor with preview capabilities is just a given if you're doing serious web front-end development.
I've used tons of these suckers: HomeSite, FrontPage, InterDev (more than an HTML editor, granted), Chami-KIT, Arachnophilia, CoffeeCup, NotePad, etc. etc. etc. And while I'm reasonably confortable with all of them, my personal favorite and the one I use at home is HomeSite.
Well, the licensing is too prohibitive for me to be dragging HomeSite around with me everywhere I go, and besides, I'm lazy. I wanted something I could download off the net, install and go.
1stPage is that tool.
First of all - it's free. Free, free, free. And did I mention it's free? You can't beat the price, so let's move on...
Second - 1stPage is pretty much a HomeSite clone. It's got a little different interface and some added/missing functionalities, but it's basically a HomeSite knockoff. But it's free.
So, basically, 1stPage is an all around decent code-based editor. It integrates nicely with your browsers, built-in FTP, and project management capabilities.
Some caveats:
- The tabbing facility is atrocious. I was hoping that they would fix this in version 2, but alas, no such luck. Tabs do not work intuitively. If you tab and then attempt to backspace to remove the tab, you must backspace through the spaces that it places in your code. Granted, I save my tabs as spaces when I save my files, but I don't want the tabs to act as spaces when I am editing. This is a big peeve for me.
- No integrated CSS editor. HomeSite has TopStyle at least. With 1stPage you are out of luck.
- It's got a long start-up time. This is just a pet peeve of mine. However, with version 2, this seems shorter than before.
- no tag auto-completion or attribute auto-selection. You are forced to open and close all tags by yourself and add in all attributes. Of course, 1stPage does support right-click tag editing, but only on certain tags.
But there's hope:
- 1stPage comes with a built-in reference guides to HTML, and a ton of built-in links to CSS, Cold Fusion, DOM, Perl, SSI, PHP, Javascript.
- It has built-in Perl and htmlScript scripts that can be added with the click of a couple buttons.
- It has tons of built-in JavaScripts and DHTML code that can be added to your page.
- It comes with HTMLTidy - to clean up and validate your code. It also includes an HTML source compressor to remove whitespace when your page is completed, saving precious bytes.
All in all, 1stPage is a full-featured editor with a ton of useful features and only a few problems. If you perform web development, and need a decent, inexpensive tool, this should be your choice. I have downloaded it and handed it out everywhere I have been sent, and I expect to continue doing so. Thanks, Evrsoft for this gift.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
hurkle
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Member: Jay Turley
Reviews written: 47
Trusted by: 8 members
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