I've been playing with a few cheap HTML editors of late, but like
Chris a couple of months ago, I've been looking for the real works.
For free!
And I found it last week, via a French graphics design mag.
It comes from the
WWW consortium, no less, it's little known, and it's called
Amaya. It looks like
this (screenshot).
One drawback.
If you're running OX X, you need to install Apple's
X11, or something more unnecessarily complicated, to use it. Along with
XFree86.
And then there's
Fink, to fetch Amaya and get it in working shape.
None of this, by the way, will work unless you've already installed the developer tools which came with Jaguar (or are a very big download indeed -- 400 MB plus -- at the
Apple Developer Connection site).
It all sounds very unnerving.
Or so I thought -- until I tried.
Because developers have thought about dummies like me and made it (relatively) easy. First time round I messed it up, but on the second go it not only all worked, but has opened the door to a fabulous trove of free software.
How to do it? If you want to try, you're good, probably, for an afternoon's worth of surprises. But I promise you it's
worth it.
The following is the order in which I
should have gone about it:
1) Take a quick read of Fink and Apple's X11 at the generous
Sao's Place, which explains things you thought it was hard to understand.
2) Bookmark that. It'll help you if you get stuck.
3) Download and install X11 from this
Apple page. It's about 47MB.
4)
Still on that page, download and install the X11forMacOSXSDK. Without this nothing works. There's 4MB of this kit and it's tucked away in the bottom-right corner.
5) Reboot.
6) Fetch the Fink
binary installer via this
download page (nearly 14 MB).
7) Double-click on the package. Once it's done its thing, your terminal will open.
Don't be nervous. The Terminal will do the job
for you. This will be particularly interesting if you've never played with the terminal before. It'll ask you a few questions, making it easy to give the right answers.
And then, if I remember correctly, it'll suggest you take a coffee break. That break will prove far longer than you imagined it would be as the Mac works its magic.
(You might be fascinated enough to watch and there's even a fair chance you'll
understand chunks of the code that zip up your screen.)
Reboot again. Should you care to look, you'll notice that at the root of your hard disk, a lot has happened inside places like a folder simply called "sw", or /sw, as it should be called.
NB:
should Fink refuse to install, there's a good chance it's because there is already something in this folder. In my case it was a library file ("lib" 16 Kb), put there by heaven knows what when. On checking, I chucked it (other library folders have since "built themselves").
You are
not playing with the core of your OS, though you may fear you are because you've been asked for your admin code several times by now.
9) Here's where the
real magic begins, because now you're wondering how on earth to make Fink work.
You could do it the hard way.
Or you could download and install
FinkCommander. As the page says, this is a user interface for Fink.
If you're not alone in using OS X, I'd recommend putting this app in your home applications folder. It's not the kind of thing I'd want my daughter to start playing with.
10) Reboot yet again. This is a precaution, but it's probably also a good time to repair permissions, just in case, and run a file system check: the fsck option.
11) Open FinkCommander. You'll be astonished to find getting on for 1,300 pieces of open source software listed sitting there, free for the taking and the using.
12) Don't rush it. Take a little while just to see how the thing works before trying it. It's very intuitive to use. And all key pages mentioned up to now have an FAQ.
13) Do
not fetch "amaya" yet. It's right there, tempting and close to the top of the list, but it won't work until you have first fetched and installed "system x-free86", also in that list.
This you do by clicking on the item, then asking via the button in the top left of the toolbar for a binary package.
The point of going for binaries is that Fink compiles the software and does all the work for you.
The commander's window will behave like the terminal's. Unless you're a developer, you won't understand it all. When you're prompted for answers, you'll get helpful suggestions in plain English.
14) Suddenly it says "done".
You've got Amaya (and I made that step 14 to avoid treading on anybody's sensitivities by wishing 13 steps on them).
This is where there the real
fun begins.
I've also now got the GIMP (the open source answer to Photoshop) and a few other fabulous goodies.
Including the alternative HTML editor,
Bluefish mentioned by
Karl and
Diana in that thread of
Chris's.
These applications work simply by opening X11.
There you click on terminal in the Applications menu and it suffices to type in the name of the tool you plan to use in the "xterm" window that then opens.
Both the HTML editors are
extremely user-friendly.
Indeed, the W3C's Amaya, while it can't do
everything yet, not only assumes you know nothing about HTML, XHTML or CSS should you like it that way, but also builds you web pages in total conformity with the global standards, which should work in any browser.
Can you really ask for more?
