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[ Globe Webeditor History ]
 

:: History ::


   A new html-editor is just about to enter the scene. Behind this project is two of the leading members of the Hungarian BUG, Attila Ökrös (kesigomu) and ... (RoGer). This article is dedicated their work, and is an example for other BUGs to follow. The Hungarian BUG is quite active in many ways. They have their own forum, and members of the BUG are also involved in development of games and drivers for BeOS.

But why a new html-editor you might ask. So did Attila. He searched BeBits for html-editors and found that none of the supported the Hungarian letters and that none of therefore was usuable for their purpose.

He first found a html-editor in v1.0 at BeBits with a published source code, and then went to ... (RoGer) with his problems. RoGer started the development at once, and not long after the application had support for the special letters in the Hungarian language. The letters are used in most European languages, but not in English and therefor the problem. Attila in the meantime, translated the application to Hungarian and implemented some new features that he needed.

    Their work was then given over to the developer of the editor, and published as v1.2. Sadly, this application was not capable of creating feature rich Internet pages. This led to the startup of the Globe-project. Globe is built from scratch, and therefor don't have the limitations on the developers as an existing source code would have had.

The development of the application

As all projects, it started with a brain storming. What features could be of interest, and then a project plan with a priority of which features should be implemented. Their ideas are based on the two html-editors that they then used: Cute and HomeSite.

At first the name of the application was to be RHTML. As a start, RoGer developed the user interface. In the beginning it was just one simple window, with three tabs in the toolbar for the features that later would be implemented and the space where you would be writing the content and add the code. The user interface is logical built up and therefor easy to use. The icons and other graphics are made by Attila. Icons in an html-editor is great, making the application much easier to work with for beginners. Most of the icons adds the code automatically in the code window, but there are also other icons as for opening and saving files.

Normally, when you open a new file all BeOS-applications will open it automatically in a new window. But having several windows open at the same time with html-codings for the same page, is everything else then ideal.

The next problem was to get the code that was generated by the application, to be shown correctly in the NetPositive browser (also called WYSIWYG). This led to the implementation of previews shown in a preview window. It should be needless to say how useful this feature is in web development. In the beginning they had problems closing the preview window. They have not stopped with implementations of the html-codes that NetPositive supports, but have also included codes specific for Netscape and Internet Explorer.

The development has not gone on for a long time. But they already managed to implement all html-tags. There is also a lot of small, but useful features, and some of them have given the developers ideas for even some more features.

The application is all in all quite useable and stable. What I really like as a hobby developer of web pages is that there is different colors on the html and PHP tags.

Since they weren?t only developing the application for the Hungarian users, they have concentrated on getting multi lingual support in an early stage. But the first version was made in several national versions. But now the language is chosen in the Preference window.

Making the application available in several languages, makes it possible to get a lot more users on an early stage, giving the developer feedbacks on each stage of development. Version 0.1.5 was made available with the help from a lot of BeShare users in the following languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish and of course Hungarian.

In the future it will be much more easy to add another language. So if you want to translate it in to your own language, that please send it to one of the developers so that they can publish it to even more BeOS-users.

The future:

The development of Globe is going forward in the same impressive speed as until now. The future development will concentrate on adding more features to the application, but at the same time making it even more user friendly. In the grey part on the left of the application window, there will be an explorer showing folders and files available and ready to be written in to the web-page you are working on. You will also be able to choose an other browser then NetPositive, like Opera and Mozilla. They have also plans on making an inbuilt FTP-client in the application and a color palette showing different color standards like RGB.

By Frank Paul Silye

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