WebPlus

[GrahamMYC]

It seems one is only able to make feature requests relating to Ipad. Sorry.Not all of us use Ipad. 

As I can find no other location, I am posting here.

Having heard that Serif are withdrawing support for WebPlus I have sought alternatives. Currently I am trying to remodel my website in WordPress which is widely used. It is horribly clunky compared to WebPlus. Is there any possibility that Serif might reconsider its decision to abandon WebPlus? 

I feel it is a bit like Betamax, which lost out to VHS, even though it was superior, It would be a tragedy to lose WebPlus.

[Alfred]

These Affinity forums are only for questions and discussions about the Affinity range of apps. For questions about Serif's legacy 'Plus' software, please post to the CommunityPlus Forum.

 

[GrahamMYC]

Of course you are right, but I am trying to deflect Serif strategy, so there is little point is fiddling about among the legacy forums. This needs to be UP FRONT.

[Medical Officer Bones]

WordPress is a content management system, and can't be compared directly with a visual web editor such as WebPlus, Muse, or Xara WebDesigner. All three produce quite terrible html and css code, but that is to be expected.

Perhaps PineGrow is an option for you? Not quite as much design freedom as the aforementioned three products, but produces clean code, and is a lot of fun to use. You can build a static site in a matter of a day or two. Browsing through your website, I think WordPress might be a bit overkill. And PineGrow supports responsive sites out of the box.

Or use the PageBuilder plugin for WordPress, in combination with a good clean theme.

[Alfred]

7 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

Perhaps PineGrow is an option for you?

 

In combination with Atom, of course!

 

[GrahamMYC]

4 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

WordPress is a content management system, and can't be compared directly with a visual web editor such as WebPlus, Muse, or Xara WebDesigner. All three produce quite terrible html and css code, but that is to be expected.

Perhaps PineGrow is an option for you? Not quite as much design freedom as the aforementioned three products, but produces clean code, and is a lot of fun to use. You can build a static site in a matter of a day or two. Browsing through your website, I think WordPress might be a bit overkill. And PineGrow supports responsive sites out of the box.

Or use the PageBuilder plugin for WordPress, in combination with a good clean theme.

Thanks MOB. I am trying to hack my way through this territory as a complete amateur. My understanding (vaguely( is that the WebPlus approach is not sustainable into the future for reasons that I do not understand. I will have a look at Pinegrow. Many thanks. 

[Medical Officer Bones]

@GrahamMYC No worries. Trying to navigate this territory can be confusing to creatives without much coding experience. And web development seems to become more complicated by the day. Pinegrow is pretty simple to use, but it is still beneficial to understand the basics of html and css.

A visual tool like WebPlus relies on specific conversion links/mappings between the visual view and the resulting code, attempting to accommodate web technologies. But when web tech and approaches evolve and change, it becomes an utter chore to maintain these mappings and expand/adjust the code for the custom design view.

Pinegrow is built with and on existing web technologies instead, and those mappings are (almost) automatically supported. The view in Pinegrow is actually a real web view (Chrome based), so it really is WYSIWYG, and the developer needs not worry about translating code to view and vice versa.

Any other approach would take too much development time - or require a large team to maintain (like Adobe Muse). That is probably why Serif decided to halt WebPlus development: just too costly and inefficient. And probably too few users to back up continued development costs as well.

@Alfred While I still prefer NetBeans for heavy duty coding, Atom and Pinegrow form a mighty combo. And bring back some fun in front-end coding.

[Alfred]

54 minutes ago, Medical Officer Bones said:

A visual tool like WebPlus relies on specific conversion links/mappings between the visual view and the resulting code, attempting to accommodate web technologies. But when web tech and approaches evolve and change, it becomes an utter chore to maintain these mappings and expand/adjust the code for the custom design view.

 

The main problem with WebPlus is that it has its roots in DTP: it was originally the web-building portion of PagePlus. As such, it’s heavily reliant on absolute positioning, so although it’s fine for fixed layouts it’s unsuited to today’s need for responsive or adaptive sites. Bringing it up to date would have required it to be completely rewritten.

 

For web designers who want to stick to visual tools, WYSIWYG Web Builder from Pablo Software Solutions is looking pretty good right now.

[v_kyr]

4 hours ago, Alfred said:

 

In combination with Atom, of course!

 

LOL that worst case big memory and space eating and slow Electron based thing, OMG. The only good thing about those memory hugs is that they are free and platform portable, other than that try to open some bigger files with Atom (one Mississippi, two Mississippi ... three hundred Mississippi, stalled and astalavista crash). It's MS VS Code (also Electron based) counterpart is much better here in mostly all aspects, even it too needs more memory and space than usual code/text editors here.

People should better look for some faster, sleek and not that memory consuming editor alternatives, those who can load and deal with a bunch of bigger file sizes without any memory handling problems here.

[MikeW]

I've used UltraEdit as my editor of choice since Ian Meade released it in the mid-1990s. And really, there is nothing wrong with NotePad++ either. UE can deal with very large files. It's not uncommon for me to run macros, JavaScript and Perl f/r on 2-3 mb text files, but I have operated on far larger ones.

[v_kyr]

Even I come from old Unix habbits (SunOS, NeXTstep) and thus have been long time used to Emacs/Vi a lot, UE is one of the oldest long time editors I've still use extensively on Win. UE has no real file size editing limit, ideal to also edit giant log files with hundreds of megs in size etc. with no problems. Though it has been IMO slightly feature overloaded over the years with too much click around panels for this and that, mostly things coders usually prefer to enter via keyb shortcuts and completions instead of clicking through panels.

The last years I've worked more with SublimeText, which I use on all platforms here, since it is very fast and offers some outstanding quick and clever turnaround functions. ST can too handle and load quite big files and is also very memory efficient and even better customizable to individual coding/development needs. - NotePad++ is not portable (Win only) and has due to my experiences problems with bigger file memory handling and overall performance.

[Medical Officer Bones]

Derailing the thread a bit here...

Sure, if you're a system admin who must check large/huge log files, a lean editor is essential. For most devs, however, it's a non-issue: work occurs mainly on partials anyway. You'd be insane to organize mid-sized to large projects in just a couple of large files.

I am also aware that Atom is quite slow. Netbeans zooms through semi-larger code files consisting of thousands of lines, while those same files lag in Atom. But I love it for certain jobs. As a Markdown editor it is really nice to work with. The live connection with Pinegrow is very nice as well.

SublimeText never agreed with me. It's not really an IDE, although I know it can be extended a lot. But it just 'feels' wrong for me, and is an unattractive editor (my personal opinion). For many coders their text and code editors and IDEs are akin to the clothes they are wearing: a personal preference.

 

[v_kyr]

The Netbeans internal editor is pretty good, feature rich and powerful too, when doing Java coding in their IDE it's seldom necessary to switch over to some dedicated standalone editor (the same applies to VS here). However one can't really compare full blown IDEs with plain text/code editors here, since IDEs offer much more code context interoperating related features here, due to their embedded real language oriented parsers (ASTs for syntax + semantics etc.). An IDE therefor has much more and better capabilities in terms of syntax and error checking, code completion, object/method references and refactoring possibilities and so on. - Though some editors allow to be enhanced into the directions of an IDE with a bunch of add-ons, even they are first of all text/code writing tools here.

Markdown well, nowadays mostly every editor or IDE allows to write and preview markdown in the one or other way. The bad about Atom is as said, slowness, mem and huge disk space consumption ...

... that pic is from 2015 (so no Atom IDE stuff avail and included here with blows it up further), nowadays it occupies even much more space especially with that Atom IDE extensions. Other editors just need around ~30MB when installed. - And all that just for some simple and plain Markup editing?

Quote

For many coders their text and code editors and IDEs are akin to the clothes they are wearing: a personal preference.

That's right, people tend to feel like beeing at home and religious with those tools they use mostly and overall extensively here, be it an editor, IDE or whatever.