It's Good Enough, It's Smart Enough, and People Like it!
Written: May 04 '00 (Updated May 06 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Intuitive Interface, Great Templates and Wizards, Can Build Nice Web Pages Without Knowing HTML
Cons: One Gives Up Features to Gain Control (and Vice Versa)
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| lap0530's Full Review: Filemaker Claris Homepage |
Claris Home Page 3.0
Now a part of the FileMaker family of software products, Claris Home Page has come a long way from the humble beginnings of Claris Works, a Macintosh-only integrated software package. Claris Home Page 3.0 preserves many of the ease-of-use and simple interface features that won Claris Works a loyal Macintosh following and led to the porting of the program to the Windows environment.
What it's Got
Claris Works 3.0 is a web page creation package that can sit well with both HTML authors and WYSIWYG enthusiasts. If the user so desires, Claris will work as a visual editor, producing the code behind the scenes (but always only one click away). The HTML view is accessible for direct writing or editing if the user would rather develop or modify his or her own code.
The Home Page 3.0 program is available for a 30-day evaluation from http://www.claris.com. The download is a substantial 9.24 MB. Once installed, Home Page 3.0 offers an intuitive interface that belies some of its functionality.
One without extensive HTML knowledge can still develop and manage effective web sites using Home Page's built-in templates and assistants. The program's power lies both in its full feature set and in its provision of almost complete user control when that is wanted.
What it Does
When one starts a new file, the choices are to create a blank page, an empty site, or a frame page. The 18 "Style" templates (not to be confused with Cascading Style Sheets) present a variety of well constructed and visually pleasing layouts. The web author can choose one and then customize the layout and provide content.
For the even less experienced, the Assistants literally walk one through the entire process of creating a page or a site. The results are quite pleasing visually. Templates include a variety of helpful designs including announcements, brochures, calendars, résumés, business sites, photo gallery sites, and even genealogy and family tree pages.
I created a new page and hand coded a simple table, then used the table wizard to produce the same table. The code generated by Home Page was somewhat different from mine, though the table looked identical. Of course, I liked my coding better, but the differences were largely matters of preference, and Home Page's code was no more inflated than mine.
The table wizard has an interesting visual row spanning and column spanning feature. The user simply drags the corner sizing handle to merge cells horizontally or diagonally. The same handle can be used to split cells. Unfortunately, this is an "eyeball" operation, and sizes are not displayed as either pixels or percentages.
Other Features
One of the most interesting possibilities of Home Page is its seamless integration with FileMaker Pro to make data-enabled web sites. This is accomplished through the use of the FileMaker Connection Assistant. For database applications with a limited number of records and limited web traffic, this is a simple and effective path to data on the web. However, for industrial-strength web data management, users should look elsewhere.
Home Page also makes easy the insertion (but not the creation) of JavaScripts, VBScripts, Java applets, and media elements such as QuickTime movies through the Insert menu. Form elements can also be added visually through this menu.
In addition to all these features, Home Page finds and fixes broken links, provides a new site editor with a visual representation of the pages in a site and their linkages, and provides a number of clip art images.
What's Missing?
A few expected elements are missing in Claris Home Page 3.0. While colors are customizable for backgrounds, fonts, and links, these colors are selected from a visual color picker. While the proper hexadecimal representation is placed into the HTML code, when one edits the code directly, many of the advanced features of the program are no longer available, including the color picker, the table wizard, the anchor and image insertion buttons.
Claris Home Page adopts an all-or-nothing approach with regard to HTML coding by hand. One's choices are either to use the rich feature set and have the program add code (while completely losing control of the result), or to add code directly--without assistance of any kind. The only features available in the HTML-editing mode are print, preview, upload, link verification, and file consolidation (which places all the needed media files for the site in an appropriate directory). When the user edits the page in the WYSIWYG mode, all these features are available, but so are the object editor, the link editor, the table wizard, and document options.
One of the expected and sorely needed features Home Page lacks is an effective "Undo" operation. There is no "Undo" button, and the "Edit, Undo" menu choice unfortunately only applies to the last operation, which can be undone or redone.
Bottom Line
The bottom line is that Claris Home Page is a passable but not outstanding HTML editing environment and a passable but not outstanding WYSIWYG web page editor. By trying to do two things well, it succeeds in doing an average job of both. Web novices may find the templates and assistants very helpful, but HTML purists and experienced webmasters will most likely find themselves looking somewhere else for a web building tool.
Home Page is good enough for simple-to-moderate web site creation and management applications. It's smart enough to let you have direct access to and control over your HTML code. And many people obviously like it. But at the same time, by doing many things adequately, it doesn't do a stellar job of any of them. As Stuart Smalley (aka Al Franken) would say, "It's not perfect, but that's…okay."
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
lap0530
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Location: Anderson, SC
Reviews written: 122
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About Me:
Psychology and management professor and business consultant
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