NetObjects Fusion 3.0

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On: 2023-12-23 17:39:27
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What is NetObjects Fusion 3.0?

When Fusion first arrived on the scene, NetObjects promised designers the kind of control over their Web sites that they had over print pages, but the company couldn't deliver. Although version 2.0 made great strides, it's only with version 3.0 that NetObjects has delivered a versatile Web development tool. Now sporting flexible page and site editors and strong support of Dynamic HTML features, Fusion has come of age.

Ahead of Its Time

Fusion’s pasteboard has always been one of the program's killer features. With a pasteboard-layout metaphor, you create complex Web pages simply by dragging are on a par with those in GoLive's CyberStudio and Macromedia's Dreamweaver (see Reviews, September 1998).

But not all pages really call for a drag-and-drop design approach. It's much easier to treat pages with long streams of text as one large text block, rather than as several smaller layout elements. With version 3.0, Fusion's page editor allows authors to create pages (including those with in-line graphics) entirely within a word processor-style interface, similar to that of competitors CyberStudio and FileMaker's Home Page. You can also opt to use the contents of a hand-coded HTML file as the body of a page (using Fusion merely to generate navigational elements), add custom HTML tags within pages, and add externally generated HTML pages to die site structure.

The Site's the Thing

Fusion's other claim to fame has been the program's integrated site-management tools. Since the entire structure of a Web site is saved within Fusion, the program can automatically generate navigational buttons and links on every page of your site as well as frame sets for those navigational items. Once a site’s ready to go online, Fusion automatically generates all the appropriate files and can optionally upload them to a Web server.

In previous versions, users had little control over how Fusion organized the HTML files. But with Fusion 3.0’s Publish window, you can specify exactly where you want every file on your Web site to he placed and what you want each one to he named.

FileMaker Enters the Picture

For some time, the Windows version of Fusion has been able to automatically generate pages based on the contents of an external database; the Mac version finally catches up in version 3.0, letting you create pages from FileMaker Pro.

You can place a table on a Web page that contains selected fields front a selected FileMaker database, one row per record. Clicking on a row's link takes you to a detail page for a particular record, which lists other selected information extracted from FileMaker. This information is static — it doesn't update when you change the FileMaker database, but rather when you reexport HTML.

Although it's encouraging to see this feature finally come to the Mac, limitations hamper the feature's usefulness. For example, the record table follows a particular format that is impossible to edit, and you can't do very much to customize detail pages. Furthermore, the database-publishing feature is unstable: Fusion crashed several times when I tried to publish pages generated from FileMaker, and sometimes it took as much as a minute to generate a custom page.

Fusion's lineage as a port from Windows has always been a big problem, especially the program's non-Mac-standard interface. Although Fusion still won't win any design awards, its collection of floating palettes, window tabs, and dialog boxes lias been streamlined.

Fusion lacks printed documentation; NetObjects provides a 146-page Getting Started guide, bit I constantly had to refer to the program's full documentation — a 500-page PDF file.

Snell, Jason. (November 1998). NetObjects Fusion 3.0. Macworld. (pg. 37).


Download NetObjects Fusion 3.0 for Mac

(161.16 MiB / 168.99 MB)
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Architecture


68K + PPC (FAT)



Compatibility notes


Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver





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