Mobilemind

Briefly, Dreamweaver 8 wins hands down. This is a follow-up to my earlier post about tools from PortableApps.com. I really wanted to like and use Nvu, since I've come to love Firefox and Thunderbird. Nvu has the right pedigree, extensibility, speed, rendering and more. Nvu just isn't as fully featured as it need to be and requires too many compromises and inconveniences for daily work. Currently, there aren't enough extensions to patch those issues either. For me the key issues were:

• No "round-tripping" of code; Nvu messes with your indents and line breaks.
• No ASP/CFM/JSP/PHP/XML editing; I want code highlighting and hints for more than just HTML. And if I wanted to use Eclipse for that, I would have started in Eclipse tools.
• No local/remote sync; you can work with either local files OR a remote/FTP location
• No "offset" when editing a remote site; My web site is NOT at the root level of my server. Unlike Dreamweaver Nvu doesn't have a convenient, way of indicating that "http://mobilemind.net/" is equivalent to "ftp://ftp.mobilemind.net/www-root". In such cases Nvu gets confused and sees any tags with relative references to the root like "/images/logo.gif" as broken links.

I will still use Nvu as my "thumbdrive HTML editor," but even that requires a few critical add-ons.

• HandCoder- Adds advanced source editing tools including code formatting (which requires HTML Tidy), a Dw-like tag structure status line, and tools to link to external editors (for text file formats).
• Nvu Site Manager ConText- Adds context menus to the Nvu site manager to launch external editor (for ANY file type found in your site). Similar to Launchy extension for Firefox/Thunderbird.
• URL Cleaner- Nvu extension to transform local URLs (file:///) into relative URLs.
• HTMLHeader- (Note: Links to XPI file, DON'T click and accidentally install into your copy of Firefox.)- an extension for editing the header of your HTML files

Conveniently, one of those critical add-ons has a FAQ that reiterates most of my gripes (see http://fabiwan.kenobi.free.fr/HandCoder/#faq).
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A few weeks ago, I had to part with my laptop and I was worried about getting internet withdrawal symptoms. While I was waiting for my new laptop to arrive, I set up a 1GB USB thumb drive with Firefox and all my bookmarks stored on it for browsing. I also set-up Thunderbird for POP3 and IMAP email access, and GAIM a multi-protocol IM client (simultaneously supports AOL, Google, MSN and Yahoo messaging). This is way cool, I can walk up to any decent Windows machine, pop in the USB thumb drive, and voila-- all my browsing, email & IM clients are raring to go. The only downside is that you must scan that portable drive for viruses VERY carefully if you've used it on any public machine. I had heard of the USB drive approach over at the FurryGoat blog about one year ago, but never got around to doing it. Now I had good reason to do it and while looking for something about Thunderbird on Mozillazine, I found out about all the other applications that John Haller has helped set-up for this sort of use.      PortableApps.com - Your Digital Life, Anywhere™

PortableApps.com is a community site devoted to the development, promotion and use of portable applications. The site was created by John T. Haller (aka me), the developer behind numerous portable applications (like Portable Firefox, Portable Thunderbird and Portable OpenOffice.org) as a way to centralize the knowledge and development efforts of multiple portable application efforts.

Though I expect to be getting my new copy of Dreamweaver 8 real soon, I was intrigued to see that there is a "portable" version of the HTML editor Nvu (pronounced en-view). This looks like a fairly compelling open-source offering for web-page editing; tabbed document interface, W3C validation, spell check, FTP site management, CSS support and more. I'm curious to hear if any open-source advocates in the elearning community have tried Nvu. I'm going to give it a shot later this week and report back.
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I made some updates to my blog template (roll-over tool-tips for the sidebar links, changing "Macromedia" to "Adobe/Macromedia", updating the IEEE LTSC and IMS links, permanent links to entries via the title of the post, etc). Apologies if this made your RSS aggregators freak a bit as I republished quite often-- editing blog templates can be a trial-and-error-and-error process. The most noteworthy change is that comments are on now. Hopefully, I'll write something new and comment-worthy soon. Meantime, feel free to comment on older posts. The other interesting news is that I managed to pass the W3C Markup Validation Service check for XHTML 1.0

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In case you missed reading it at my official Macromedia blog (Elearning Moving Forward), I have moved on from Adobe. December 9, 2005 was officially my last day. Hopefully Silke Fleischer (and others?) will continue the Elearning Blog in my absence. I just got a new laptop today and I can't wait get started on some new projects. All the software I ordered from Adobe just can't arrive soon enough. Here are some of the things I plan on working on in 2006:

• Updates to the AICC PENS documentation and Test Harness (see forum posts here)
• A PENS Test Suite/Server-side Validater in PHP (Hint: send an email to mobilemind@pobox.com and I'll let you know where the test suite lives right now)
• Updates to this site and the blog format
• Posting more regularly on the ASTD Learning Circuits Blog (there's serious dust on my last entry)
• Getting more proficient with S1000D
• Thinking about a consistent way to track learner activity in virtual classrooms (see Learning Circuits entry above)
• Working with lots of the friends I've made over the years
• Doing more with simulations and Captivate and Flash and maybe even Flex
• Maybe even writing a book

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