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Akarin

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 16, 2011
290
17
Nyon, Switzerland
Hi all,

I am just switching from PC to Mac and not being a professional web-designer (although a pro .NET coder), I was wondering if there was any good HTML visual editor on Mac other than Dreamweaver (which is cool but way too complex for my simple needs)? At the moment, on PC, I'm building most of my web UI with Visual Studio 2010 and/or Microsoft Expression.

Ideally, I would like my workflow to be:

- Create the layout with Fireworks CS5 (the only Adobe soft I own) on Mac
- Edit the HTML on Mac with [insert a soft]
- Move the whole stuff over to Parallels Desktop and write the .NET code with Visual Studio / SQL Server.

Why the visual editing on Mac rather than Windows? Well, I find the environment under Mac OS X to be more prone to creativity. Subjective, I know, but I like it much better for anything visual.

Thanks for your time.
 

Dolorian

macrumors 65816
Apr 25, 2007
1,086
0
Check out Espresso and Coda. Neither will allow you to use a design view like Dreamweaver (which is a horrible thing anyway) but offer a webkit based live preview and have very good HTML and CSS editing tools as well. Both are also truly native Mac apps, unlike Dreamweaver.
 

Akarin

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 16, 2011
290
17
Nyon, Switzerland
Check out Espresso and Coda. Neither will allow you to use a design view like Dreamweaver (which is a horrible thing anyway) but offer a webkit based live preview and have very good HTML and CSS editing tools as well. Both are also truly native Mac apps, unlike Dreamweaver.

I've seen them both, yes... But actually, I don't want to use a preview after building a page in HTML manually. I prefer to use a design view and then tweak the HTML. It's faster, requires less typing and can give me a feel of what the finished page will look like. I'm not under the impression that exists on Mac OS X, aside from Dreamweaver, am I wrong?

Seems like I will be reinstalling Expression on Parallels Desktop :(
 

angelwatt

Moderator emeritus
Aug 16, 2005
7,852
9
USA
I've never found a visual HTML editor (WYSIWYG) that met all of my requirements, even DreamWeaver. One free one I'll use on occasion, mostly for documentation, is Blue Griffon. It's based on the project Kompozer, which was based on Nvu. The code keeps living on as new projects. It's based on the Gecko renderer (what Firefox uses).
 

TonyK

macrumors 65816
May 24, 2009
1,032
148
Coming from the Windows world, I found RapidWeaver to be a good tool and is what I use for my personal stuff. My day job keeps me in Flex and .Net but at home I'm 100% OS X and RapidWeaver.

RapidWeaver is based on templates which makes site management pretty easy. Want a different look, select a different template and publish. There are tools for management of templates and creating new templates based on existing templates. They are CSS/HTML/JavaScript based.

Just looked at Coda and it reminds me a lot of RapidWeaver. RW costs less and allows for multi-site management with direct publishing.

Coda's integration with SVN is a good thing and can help if you are using SVN for version control.
 
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