Switching

One of the reasons I've been quiet on the Weblog is that I've been in the process of switching from PC to iMac. I've been thinking of this for a long time and using an iMac briefly recently, decided I had to make the effort. I had become fed up with getting that 'Sorry this application has to close, would you like to tell Microsoft?' message and I seemed to spend more time waiting for the machine to boot up or applications to open (or re-open) that I decided the switch was necessary.

However, it takes time, including putting VMFusion on to the iMac so that I can run Windows. Now, why would I want to do that, given the problems? Well, it is essentially only for one program - Homesite, my HTML editor, which isn't available for the Mac. The last version, 5.5, was put out about 8 years ago and I think that Adobe has probably abandoned its development. In the software industry, 8 years is a long time to go without a new version.

I've been using it since it was shareware produced by Nick Bradbury - he and his program were bought by Allaire, which was bought by Macromedia, which was bought by Adobe, which will be bought by... who knows? I find that blogs and discussion groups devoted to Web design on the Mac all have individuals who have been using Homesite as long as I have and who bewail the fact that nothing for the Mac is anything like as good. I can testify to this - I've tried out just about every freeware, shareware and priced html editor for the Mac and not one of them is anywhere near as good.

Why Homesite hasn't been ported to the Mac is a mystery - perhaps Bradbury's latest development, TopStyle, which is an xhtml, html and css editor, which looks very much like Homesite, will make the transition.