What is Claris Home Page 2.0?

When we reviewed Claris Home Page 1.0 (Nov/96, p58), we admired its interface but complained that it lacked many essential features. Among other things, the initial release didn’t support client-side image maps, WYSIWYG table manipula- tion, or preview of background patterns, and it offered no help with managing or uploading a site. Frame creation was implemented but was a serious chore.

At first glance, version 2.0 looks pretty much like the original. The few improvements and additions, however, are significant. In several features, such as uploading your site, Home Page now beats the big boy on the block, Adobe PageMill 2.0.

All the attraction of version 1.0 remains: Home Page displays a good preview of the page and sports all the tools we’ve come to expect.

Commonly used functions are available in a toolbar, search and replace is well implemented, and a scrapbook stores page elements. Nearly everything is handled via drag and drop or straightforward dialog boxes.

Home Page’s four modes — WYSIWYG editing, browser-imitating preview, bare HTML text editing, and the new frame-editing mode — are selected via the toolbar. Image import and manipulation are fully supported. Version 2.0 adds refinements to HTML editing mode; for example, HTML syntax is now indicated by colors. The online help is well indexed and is a good supplement to the manual.

Home Page can now display a background image, which is handy when choosing font colors and backgrounds. You can spell-check the entire document or just a selection of text (though checking a selection locked up our Mac) . Version 2.0 adds support for drag- ging Java applets and plug-in files onto a page. QuickTime movies are now previewed with a display of the first frame — better than nothing, but not exactly useful if your movies fade in from black.

In version 2.0, creating and manipulating a table is almost completely WYSIWYG. You can finally drag table borders to resize cells, and — hooray! — tab-delimited text is automatically pasted as a table. Frames, in contrast, are improved but remain half-baked. A window displays the arrangement of frames, and you can change frame sizes by di’agging, but Home Page You have to switch back and forth to a browser to see what the final product looks like.

Home Page’s most exciting new feature, which so far is unique among WYSIWYG page creation apps, is Remote Saving. On command, the application creates a “site definition file” to track the files and folders that make up your Web set. (While it’s “consolidating” your site, however, it can’t update broken local links. If you’ve changed your directory structure, you face the tiresome task of answering a dialog box for each broken link.) After a one-time setup with your provider’s FTP information, a single click uploads your entire site onto your Web host. Home Page will also upload a single page and, optionally, that page’s associated image files.

For simple sites or new Webmasters, Home Page first offers to move all the site’s images into a folder (and corresponding remote directory) called Images. For more complex sites, there’s an option simply to mirror the local folder structure.

If you want to tweak a page that you’ve already uploaded, Home Page’s Remote Open will view and download any page from your site and will revert a local page to the version on your remote site.

The WYSIWYG page-creation battle has only two serious contenders. Home Page now meets or beats Adobe PageMill 2.0 in several important respects. If you work a lot with frames, then PageMill remains the clear winner, and overall it does a better job displaying true WYSIWYG files such as animated GIF files. But Home Page 2.0 sports a more intuitive interface, provides simple one-step uploading of your entire site, and allows tab-delimited text to be imported as a table.

Holmes, Joseph O. (April 1997). Claris Home Page 2.0. MacAddict. (pg. 65).

Download Claris Home Page 2.0 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.1 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II