Beautiful, just beautiful... (MAX HTML Beauty)

Member Name: ronniec

Product:	MAX HTML Beauty
Date:	06/03/01 (175 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Looks great, fast to load and run, extensive feature set, very customisable, and Kelly Brook.

Disadvantages: Always in beta testing of sorts, no warranties (obviously).

Picture a world where creating a webpage didn't involve endless cutting and pasting in Notepad; where you can click a button and have your paragraph tags inserted just like that; where you can use a whole range of powerful features to make it all a breeze.

This world, should it exist, would have only one HTML editor, and that would be MAX's HTML Beauty. As a long-time user of this freeware product, I would not be able to live with myself if I did not spread the word of this glorious product.

What exactly makes it just so good? Put simply, it is beautiful. Beautiful in the way that Anna Friel smiles, or Gary Bushell makes a fool of himself every week. Software does not turn me on very often, but this sexy piece of kit (to quote Jeremy Clarkson) arouses me more than a remake of the Emmanuelle films starring Shannon Tweed. Since its first version in the summer of 2000, Beauty has grown into an editor which can seriously rival even the best commercial alternatives - Allaire's HomeSite included, which is quite a feat. Add to this the constant and rapid development of the product and you may begin to understand why I feel such loyalty towards it.

Beauty's feature-set is extensive, while still weighing in at a meagre 2Mb download. The screen layout is simple yet includes all the elements which are so rarely combined in other editors. A central viewing pane occupies the largest portion of the screen, which can display your files in any available font. Syntax-highlighting is built in, and includes a number of different schema for various file types - not only HTML, but JavaScript, Perl, CSS and even Pascal. This makes it a very useful all-round programming tool. Should the colour scheme not be to your liking, it can be easily customised through the extensive options screen.

To either the left or right of the viewing pane (dependant upon your choice) sits the tremendously-useful Resource Panel, a multi-purpose beast which co
mbines an array of time-saving features. By default it is split into two, the upper portion showing a tree-display of your folders, and the lower the files in that particular folder. A number of filters can be implemented - to show, for example, only web-related files, only text files, or even all files. Two superb features can also be accessed through here, the Snippets and Tag Library pages. Respectively, they allow one to build a collection of frequently-used code which can be insterted with a click, and an array of unusual tags not included in the default editor which you may like to use regularly. As an example, I find storing my favourite gibberish as Snippets saves a great amount of time while writing my Sun column.

A Special Characters view rounds off the Panel, which gives convenient double-click access to the many HTML entities which exist - " for example. This is another great time-saver.

Beauty is geared more towards the advanced web designer, yet still supports the tools which beginners want - namely, a Power Toolbar which is home to a plethora of buttons, each one inserting an associated HTML code into your page. From the most common top-level tags, right down to table construction and common scripting elements, this is a very fast way to use common tags. Every element in here is also available for editing through the numerous Tag Designers - boxes which appear after right-clicking a tag and which allow one to edit the attributes of that particular tag. As an example, the body tag has all the standard attributes available for editing through a series of text fields, which save typing out the entire string every time.

The program interface is very flexible and is impressive at high screen resolutions in particular (though it loses nothing at lower resolutions, it must be said). The various toolbars can be "undocked" from the main program screen and made into floating windows which remain on top at all times, giv
ing you more editing space. If that is not enough, you can even move to full-screen mode which is much like a basic Notepad window yet with all the features of Beauty to boot.

A powerful find tool has been implemented in recent versions which comes in incredibly useful when maintaining large sites. Search and replace operations can be carried out across single files, whole projects or recursively through a directory structure. In particular, the support for regular expressions (powerful Unix string-matching codes) is a real boon when looking to replace numerous instances of a slightly different piece of code. Results can be optionally displayed in a Results pane which lists the files and can take you right to the line(s) replaced in each one.

To further save time (and those RSI-inducing Alt-Tabs), an internal viewer supports Internet Explorer previews at the moment, with Netscape v6 support due in forthcoming versions. In full-screen mode in particular, this feature works very well as it is a simple matter of moving between the F8 and F9 keys for editing and preview modes.

A basic image viewer is included, although there are many better alternatives available for your dodgy picture browsing. The HMTL Tidy module from the W3C is also supported, although personally I find this disruptive to my programming style. For those with Word 97 or higher installed, a spell checker is also included which has potentially great use. At the time of writing the implementation is a little flaky, but to be fair it is made clear this is a beta feature and should not be relied upon (for example, it checks HTML tags for "spelling" errors as well as text itself).

The program is very customisable, from the display font, to the case in which to insert HTML tags, right down to the ability to customise the splash screen at startup! These are fast-becoming Beauty's trademark, featuring models such as Kelly Brook and Carmen Electra. The author,
Marko Njezic, has been misinterpreted in his inclusion of these, but believe me, they are an entertaining touch.

Product support is excellent for a freeware program, with Marko encouraging feedback and bug reports. He has taken on board and implemented several of my suggestions alone, and through either e-mail or the useful support forums you can be sure of getting in touch with him. Users have much more of a say with products such as Beauty than they ever do with commercial alternatives - so if there is a feature you would like to see included, there is a very good chance it will happen if you make your voice heard.

It is impossible to cover Beauty's features entirely, the best way being to try out the program for yourself. I would genuinely rank it above all other freeware editors, and alongside even the best commercial programs in all but a couple of respects. Beauty is a superb HTML editor which I cannot recommend highly enough - I only hope I have done enough to convince you to give Marko's splendid work a try.

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