The sad state of web site authoring on OS X -- and XP

I recently came across a set of enthusiastic announcments about RapidWeaver. I tried it in demo mode.

Simple, yes. Useful? Minimally. By comparison to FrontPage 98 it's a toy. (FrontPage after 1998 went into a downwards death spiral comparable to the post 1997 collapse of Microsoft Word.)

So then I tried NVU, an open source Java app. It's a partial clone of FrontPage 2000 (shame they didn't clone FP 98!!). It's far beyond RapidWeaver, but one of the first things I did was create an anchor on a page, then create a link on the same page to that anchor. The HTML was well formed, but the GUI didn't create a viewable link. Ooookaaay, so much for NVU.

Well, there's always the ghost of Mozilla composer, though it's very much a page rather than site oriented application. Then there's Dreamweaver, with its increasingly feeble OS X support. I suppose there a bunch of other page oriented solutions.

Here's Faughnan's test for a serious web authoring tool. I don't think any OS X app can pass this test today -- FrontPage 98 did it well:

• View a web site as a file hierarchy or a directed graph of links.
• Click on page icon see metadata, drag and drop into a page to create a link with text taken from target page title.
• Create an anchor on a page. Drag and drop to create a link to anchor. Drag anchor to another page to create a link.
• Change the physical location or file name of a page. Have all links in web site update to reflect this change.

If a document-oriented end-user tool can't do this, it's not a serious contender. In 1997 (almost 9 years ago) we had at least four applications that were contenders, of which FrontPage/Vermeer was only one (AOL had another, I forget the rest). Now we have a range of OS X solutions that look like this:

• Blogger with TextArea support for Firefox/IE (but not Safari)
• Slightly more sophisticated blogger solutions
• Various page oriented solutions (wordprocessor save as HTML)
  
• Toy site management tools like RapidWeaver
• The missing domain once inhabited by FrontPage
• The missing domain once inhabited by Dreamweaver
  
• Industrial content management solutions that aren't particularly author-friendly and cost thousands of dollars.
  

The XP situation is only slightly better (if you consider Dreamweaver to be a non-industrial solution). Alas, the bottom line is that there just isn't a large enough market like me! I do need to migrate off of FrontPage on my XP machine. Perhaps my best option is to see how active NVU development is, and do some QA for them.

Canon lenses: a nice review

I'm nerving myself to buy a Digital Rebel XT for myself for "christmas". This is neat review: Photo.net: Review of lenses for the Canon EOS 300D and EOS 10D. The one I really like is the f1.8 50mm for $70. The XT sensor is smaller than the 10D so this would be 'zoomy', but it's a pro lens for an amazing price. The key reason I want the XT is to be able to do available light photography, and the equivalent of a 60-70mm 35mm lens would be not bad at all.

Jon Udell likes this anti-SAD sunlight desk lamp

BlueMax Desk Lamps

iPod over all -- 10/10 on Amazon

Amazon.com: Early Adopters - computers list has an iPod in each of the top 10 slots. That's astonishing.

Replicate the experience of 19th century phone service

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, one can combine Skype VOIP, a modern laptop, a wireless LAN and a USB full duplex speakerphone to recreate the turn of the (prior) century experience of yelling "HELLLLOOOO, CAN YOU HEAR ME??".

Pretty bloody awful really. Must be the negative energy field I project. In any case, it'll be handy for picking up my voice mail from my parent's home in Montreal.

Greenspun stuff to checkout

Philip Greenspun's Weblog:

Some interesting things that I learned about at the Hacker's Conference that either are or have Web sites:

• http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html and http://www.googleguide.com/help/calculator.html
  [jf: these are really superb!]
  
• http://www.nw.com/nw/projects/cubatron/
• http://www.dataplace.org/
• ...
  
• * http://mappoint.msn.com/directionsfind.aspx (select the "LineDrive" format and watch in awe as Microsoft draws you a schematic map to your destination, with the uninteresting long freeway sections compressed and the complex local neighborhood sections in detail, all black and white for easy printing, proof that not everything interesting is happening at Google)

Flickr now supports printing -- at least in the US!

At last. Flickr now supports print ordering - at least for US custoemrs. It will be interesting to see how well they do it. Aeons ago I tried to get various vendors to understand what they needed to do to make print ordering grandma-friendly. You'd think they'd understand that I was suggesting, free of charge, a way for them to print money. Alas, nobody got it.

I'll see if Flickr gets it.

I've used Shutterfly and Smugmug and a few others. I liked Smugmug's service but not their limited Mac support. Flickr has a good iPhoto uploader -- but don't integrate your Flickr and Yahoo accounts just yet -- that breaks most of the uploaders.

Now that Flickr offers printing, and since Smugmug's Mac support is weak, I think Flickr may be my business.