MacAttapp: Apple Software and Application Reviews

Nvu (pronounced N-view)

From the Nvu Website:

Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Macintosh, Windows and Linux desktop users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver. (Well that’s what Nvu says anyhow). Nvu (which stands for “new view”) makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Nvu is 100% open source and released under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Anyone is welcome to download Nvu at no charge, including the source code if you need to make special changes. Developers are encouraged to get involved and help make Nvu even better.

I’ve always been a big supporter of open-source, especially since we run all Linux web servers here at Maine Hosting Solutions.

Review:

Nvu is an easy-to-use free WYSIWYG web editor with many features that allow you to create and maintain a fully functional website, complete with forms. Great for a simple editor, but not nearly as powerful as RapidWeaver, but what do you expect for FREE. I guess what I should really be saying is if it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Nvu is limited, but if you’re looking to do simple edits to an existing website it can be an easy workaround. With limitations right off the bat I limited my review a bit, not many of you are too interested in a web dev app that isn’t full featured.

The moment you go beyond the basics, or move beyond table-based layout to follow current web site development practices Nvu’s weaknesses start showing. Any current ‘How-to book’ will guide a web-site developer towards using CSS and DIV tag controls. Once you start moving beyond the basics site management, HEAD tag editing, and HTML editing become increasingly important. In all these areas Nvu struggles, significantly limiting its appeal. Still FREE though, gotta give it that.

One thing I really found lacking was the site manager, Dreamweaver and GoLive set the stage for site managers and most modern web editing apps out there have some form of one, not Nvu. You keep all your files online, or open them one by one in the editor from a folder on your drive. This makes it difficult to do relative linking, but not impossible.

All in all Nvu wrote pretty clean code, functioned well (no bugs or crashes noticed on an Intel based iMac running Leopard), was simple to install and did what they say it does, edits webpages. Downside is that’s where it ended, don’t think your going to do some killer designs with this package.

Recommendation

Perfect for users who have had their site designed by a professional and need access to their files online to make simple edits to text and photos. Great replacement for anyone using FrontPage that doesn’t want to spend ANY money to keep editing their site, with some frustrations, as they are already used to. This review series of web editors under $100 will show better aps than Nvu, but for FREE this is the best FREE app I’ve seen, and it runs on OSX, Win and Linux.

You can download Nvu at no charge!

NEXT: Coda 1.1, this thing looks really promising. Stay Tuned!

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