I recently bought a copy of HotMetal Pro 4.0, and I have to say I was underwhelmed.
Oh, it has it's good points - the triple-view thing (raw HTML, "tags on", and WYSIWYG) is very handy. It does a good job of doing ALL of maintaining your structure if you go in and code by hand, doing clean indents, etc. and not messing up your pages with extraneous code.
But the support (or lack thereof) for dynamic HTML features, style sheets, etc. is a joke. And, unfortunately, that is what buyers of HTML editors are looking for today.
Macromedia's DreamWeaver looks very promising in those areas, but has some SERIOUS problems of it's own - it DOES muck up your HTML with all sorts of extraneous stuff (it leaves extra <P></P>, <FONT ...></FONT> etc all over the place after you've been editing in WYSIWYG mode for a while), the style sheet support is quite incomplete (as is SoftQuad's as well, I'm afraid), and their support for animating layers, while cute, is just plain WRONG-HEADED. (Writes awful inline non-object-oriented Javascript code where it should be using a libary stored in an attached file, IMHO.)
I did go out and buy Hotmetal Pro, even after the demo download from their web site failed to install, because I was so frustrated with DreamWeaver... At 1/3 the price, of course, I suppose my expectations shouldn't be so high.
However, I find myself just about right back where I started - coding HTML by hand. As I'm experimenting with layers, the WYSIWYG mode is totally useless, since it doesn't render the layers in the proper position (e.g. it basically just ignores the styled <DIV> tags that define the layers) Well, I've got nice syntax coloring, and some nice tag macros, which I suppose is a step up from using WinEdit. But I'm not sure what I'm getting that I'm not getting with, say, Hot Dog or Home Site.
I've seen some encouraging comments about their NEXT version, but then news of staff cutbacks concerns me. I don't like the comments about "working with outside software developers", either. Their CD-ROM is now a hodge-podge of disjoint applications that only nominally work together, and this suggests that we will see more of the same, instead of an integrated product.
The biggest problem SoftQuad seems to have is keeping up with both the HTML standards and the browser implementations. They've always had a problem with this, and so I wonder if this will ever change? I spoke with them very early on when the product was quite expensive, and opted not to use it, because (at the time) they were very stubborn in not implementing browser features that were outside of the standard. (I think that's for ME, THE AUTHOR to decide, not my software tool vendor!) Obviously, they have changed their tune on that, but I see they are still months behind the browsers. Not good.
They've recently started selling HotMetal Pro 4.0 in retail stores (CompUSA, etc.) and I wonder what their return rate is? While they don't seem to have the quality problems that Macromedia does (I predict a HUGE return rate there...) I think that a lot of buyers may be as disappointed with it as I was.
I haven't looked at the financials or even the chart (just happened to see this thread fly by as the "most recent post" earlier this afternoon, and was curious), so I'm not up on the details except by scanning a few posts here. Perhaps, though, my comments can help some solve the puzzle as to why this thing is selling near cash.
BTW, I do give them an "A" for customer service. I had my computer on it's side (hard disk has been acting flakey unless it's turned on it's side... ohoh...) and I kicked the CD-ROM button with my foot, the CD popped-out, I didn't notice, and it wound-up *underneath* the computer, and got pretty badly scraped. I called Softquad, and they shipped me out a replacement, free. They asked if it was OK to send it ground, and I figured, OK, for free that's fine with me. But it arrived the next day FedEx. Nice. But, it would seem, wasteful. |
