 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Namo WebEditor 4 Bernadette Houghton bernieh@iaccess.com.au |
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Having never heard of Namo Webeditor before it arrived for review, I was expecting a fairly run-of-the-mill program. The reality was quite different; Namo is an intuitive program with a substantial feature-set and a wide selection of tools.
A visual Web page editor, Namo insulates novices from the technical side of Web design by offering a series of wizards for almost every task. If you're a beginner, you can start with the Site Wizard, which creates a set of structured Web pages based upon the selections you make. There are 200 pre-designed themes, each complete with coordinated buttons, banners, backgrounds, graphics, and paragraph styles. Once the Wizard has created your site, you can customise it however you like. Changing a site or series of pages from one theme to another is a question of a couple of clicks, and if you don't like the placement of objects on the page, you can move them elsewhere or trash them altogether. If you decide to expand your site later on, perhaps with a catalogue, photo album or order pages, Namo can create the pages and integrate them into the rest of the site.
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Namo's interface is very much drag-and-drop, with tabs at top of the main window to switch between open documents, and tabs at the bottom to swap among different viewing modes. You'll work mainly in Edit mode, but you can check how your work is progressing in Preview mode, or work directly with HTML code in HTML Source mode. If you're using frames, you'll notice a few extra tabs along the bottom offering frame-specific views.
In Edit mode, Namo's tools operate in a similar manner to those in most word processors. As you would expect, there is on-the-fly spell checking, undo/redo (which handles a mind-boggling 200 levels), support for macros, and automatic hyperlink creation. At times I felt that Namo was vigorously pushing the boundary towards being more like a desktop publisher than a word processor. Among the more interesting and intuitive capabilities are a pencil tool, with which you can draw tables, and an eraser tool to merge table cells. Layer support is built-in, with support for Z positions, whereby layers are arranged according to index number.
If you're using frames, you can remove unwanted frames just by resizing them to zero. The inclusion of basic image-editing tools means you can touch up images without needing a third-party image editor. You can even create simple animations by grabbing a sprite with the mouse and dragging it around while Namo records its path. Timelines control the timing and sequence of animations.
Also worth noting are the theme-related dynamic navigation bars and smart banners, which automatically update as you add, rename, rearrange and otherwise manipulate documents in a project. You can customise the look of these with the Smart Button Wizard, and since they are vector-based, you can resize them without loss of clarity.
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Namo uses a project structure to manage sites, with a graphical navigation tree from which you can drag and drop documents to alter relationships between pages. The project approach puts at your fingertips additional features, such as global search-and-replace, and the ability to identify broken links and orphan files. When you're ready to upload your site, you can use Namo's integrated FTP tool to upload either individual pages or the whole site to a Web server.
If you like to delve into HTML code, Namo offers some useful productivity tools, such as automatic indenting, tag colour coding and line numbering. Namo is primarily a visual page editor, however, so its HTML tools remain basically just those of an enhanced text editor. You can import documents or entire Web sites from the Internet, and edit them as usual in Namo; a nice touch is the ability to choose whether source code is reformatted.
To toss around a few more features, Namo's JavaScript Wizard enables you to apply 16 pre-defined special effects, such as rollovers, drop-down menus and scrolling text. The Script Manager makes it easier to manage multiple JavaScripts in a document, and the Database Wizard enables you to create both static and dynamic database-enabled documents. A Chart Wizard can also import spreadsheet tables from Microsoft Excel, and the Image Gallery Wizard can create image and thumbnail galleries in a few steps.
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Namo supports both CSS1 and CSS2 cascading style sheets, HTML 4.0, DHTML, JavaScript, XML and Microsoft Source Safe version control software. There are spelling dictionaries for 13 Western languages, as well as support for Global IME so you and input and edit text in 2-byte character sets such as Japanese. You can change the language encoding of an entire site in one click, and use the equation editor to insert mathematical formulae into your pages.
Other nice touches include a 300-page manual - quite a novelty these days - and automatic workspace preservation when you exit and re-enter Namo.
Assessment
I found Namo delightfully easy to use. The pre-designed themes
are attractive, and Namo includes all the features you'd expect to find in a beginner-level package, as well
as many advanced features for more experienced users. Namo doesn't rate with heavy-duty Web editors such as
Macromedia's Dreamweaver, but it has more than enough power for beginners to moderately experienced users.
Once you step out of the safety of the wizards and pre-designed themes, Namo is a little trickier to use, as
you'd expect, but it retains most of its intuitiveness and user-friendliness.
As with just about any program, there are some idiosyncrasies, such as the inability to alter the text of a
hyperlink without redoing the whole thing, and Site Manager windows that simply refuse to accept you've
finished with them. While you don't have to use the pre-defined themes Namo provides, not doing so restricts
the use you can make of some other features. Dynamic navigation bars, for instance, only work with the
pre-defined themes, so if you create your own theme, you'll have to update any navigation bars
manually.
One other issue worth mentioning is that Namo requires fairly
current versions of browsers to display its pages optimally. This means version 4 or later of either Internet
Explorer or Netscape Navigator. If you have sufficient knowledge of HTML tags and which of them the various
browsers support, you can easily design pages viewable in older browsers, but the onus is on you; Namo offers
nothing to make this task easier.
I like Namo a lot. Beginners will quickly feel very comfortable, and more experienced users will appreciate
many of the advanced tools.
Cost and Availability
US $99 for physical delivery, US $79 for digital delivery. Available from Sustance Pty. Ltd., ph (05) 0085 8687, fax (05) 0085 8600, e-mail kmichael@sustance.com. Download an evaluation version from http://www.sustance.com/prod/namo/index.html
Minimum System Requirements
Windows 95 or Windows NT 4 SP2, 32 MB RAM, Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape Navigator 4.0, CD-ROM drive, 10 MB free hard disk space for minimum installation, 10 MB for standard installation and 200 MB for full installation.
An ODBC data source is required to create database-enabled
documents, and Microsoft Personal Web Server or Internet Information Server is required to preview
database-enabled documents.
Reprinted from the March 2001 issue of PC Update, the
magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
