15-Minute Reviews :: AFN WEB Editor v1.4

Today’s 15-Minute Review is on AFN WEB Editor version 1.4 by AFN Software – An application to aid in the development of websites.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Create and manage your website with this easy to use editor.

AFN WEB Editor is a new solution to web page coding. Its user-friendly interface makes it useful both for beginners and experts. Program has special features for HTML, CSS, SSI, PHP, SQL, Python, Java, JavaScript, VBScript and Perl.”

Quick Pros

• Cleanly laid out interface – Not overbearing look
• Tabbed interface for other management handy
• Snippet and javascript manager has some merit

Quick Cons

• Adding new Javascript files is a little awkward
• Only one file open at a time
• Basic HTML controls as buttons limited
• Missing features common to HTML editors
• New HTML file is an older format and missing a tag

Expansion

Upon your first launch of the application, you are greeted by a fairly simplistic interface, not encumbered by dozens of buttons, drop downs, panes or any bright-colored theme. The layout is very simple – A button bar along the top for some of the more common functions, followed by two panes. The narrower left pane has 6 tabs; Disk explorer, Projects, Edit controls, Javascript, Favorite files, and Favorite snippets. To the right of this is the main pane which has two tabs as well; Editor and Preview. The editor window is a standard text editor with code highlighting, framed with a few buttons for insertion of quick HTML formatting. The Preview window will show you the current file open, prompting you to save your file if you haven’t done so already.

Most of the tabs in the left pane are quite self-explanatory; However, touching on the snippets and Javascript tabs a bit, they are an interesting feature set that could be developed further. In the current form, snippets allow you to save parts of code for later re-use. Depending on your coding style, this may be very handy for pre-built HTML files of your own, analytics code and so forth. The biggest downfall with snippets is that there is no organization structure; All of the snippets get tossed into a single column with no sort functionality. As well, editing these are awkward at best, especially if you want to do a multi-line snippet. The Javascript tab is more of a pre-built area where you can use some of their prebuilt Javascript. While there is no simple way to add to this tab, you have to save the files into the Javascripts folder inside the install folder to add more. I would have preferred to have seen both of these features (Snippets and Javascript tabs) into one, managed in a folder-style layout, or even more powerful via tagging the files.

While the application does work adequately as a text editor, it doesn’t offer a great deal in the way of features or functionality. First off, the biggest downfall of this application is the lack of multiple file capability. You can only have one file open at a time. In this day and age of HTML/CSS as well as PHP includes and so forth, the lack of multi-file support is very big. As well, even though there is a tag repository, it is not very handy to use. The lack of auto-complete of any level also means you’re either using the repository or hand-typing everything. To top that off, even though there is a project manager, there is absolutely no FTP functionality, forcing you to rely on another application for your upload/download chores. There are other aspects missing that should have been addressed, but hasn’t.

For most file formats, when you create a new file the application gives you a blank page except perl and both HTML files. Perl gives you the starting line of #!/usr/bin/perl which isn’t bad, but may be a bit awkward if your installation of perl does not follow that format. As for HTML, the HTML produced is only HTML Traditional 4.01 compliant – There is no DOCTYPE or similar added, which does leave a little to be desired. In the HTML wizard, a file is generated which is missing the starting tag, and instead ends with . Pushing this through the W3C Validator it does still appear to pass, but that missing tag isn’t good.

Final Verdict

For the most part, this application does seem to show its age and doesn’t have a lot of stellar functionality. The lack of many common functions to web-specific text editors does not help with the outlook on this tool. For free or for the price of $19, this application just doesn’t give the edge needed to make it worthwhile. It needs some serious polish or even a rewrite before it becomes a possible option. There are plenty of options out there, from Komposer to Aptana Studio or even Notepad++ which offers a modern edge on raw editing of web-based files.

Posted by BladedThoth on Friday, February 22, 2008