I've mentioned Nick Bradbury's FeedDemon RSS aggregator and his TopStyle CSS/HTML editor several times on this blog. His software business was acquired last May by Newsgator and he has been spending all his time coding for FeedDemon. Although they have promised that they will continue with the development of TopStyle, they are still advertising for a Delphi developer to take development forward.
I don't hold out any hopes of an update in the near future, and quite likely not in the middle term, either. That assumes that Newsgator don't quietly drop all development.
I've been looking around at some possible replacements. My requirements are fairly simple as I don't 'do' JavaScript, php, ASP, etc. I just use it for writing CSS and HTML files. I prefer to write the code directly, rather than using a 'WYSIWYG' interface.
I've been looking at two possibles in particular, Aptana and HTMLPad, both of which appear to be quite good.
Aptana has the advantage that it is free and open source licensed under the Eclipse Public License. The disadvantage is that it is in early beta, which means it has several bugs and is missing several features. It is certainly a very powerful program and will no doubt become a very useful tool. It also has a lot of features aimed at JavaScript development, which is not something I really need.
HTMLPad has an advantage is that it looks very familiar. The interface is very like that of TopStyle, and it also has features that were in Nick's earlier editor, HomeSite. It is a shareware program, although the cost is only around a third of that of TopStyle. There are also versions that specialise in CSS, php, and one that covers all types of web documents - HTML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, PHP, ASP, SSI, WML and Perl.
Another application I've just downloaded is Nvu, which is based on the old Netscape Composer, although it has far more features. Again, it has the advantage of being open source and released under the Mozilla Public License. The interface is WYSIWYG but it is easy to switch to code view for editing. I'm still looking around the program, and several ways of doing things were counter-intuitive for me, but it's early days yet.
