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The makers of the fine products listed below have received our exclusive award and are hereby authorized to display it on their site and in their advertising.
The editors of WebDeveloper.com ® select these products based on their usefulness, quality, and features...not their price, vendor, or advertising budget. Winning products will generally be things useful for creating or maintaining Web sites, but we also run across a lot of great products that make browsing easier or interesting, and we'll tell you about them too.
WebDeveloper.com®
Product Award Winners
11 March 1999:
FirstPlace Software
for
WebPosition Gold Pro.
I'm pleased to recognize FirstPlace Software with our coveted WebDeveloper.com Product Award...and the first award of 1999!
See the complete product review here.
-- D. Fiedler
October 19, 1998:
Allaire Corporation
for
HomeSite 4.0.
I'm pleased to recognize Allaire with our coveted WebDeveloper.com Product Award. HomeSite 4.0, a fantastic HTML editor, also makes history by being the first product to win this award on the very day of product release!
See the complete product review here.
-- D. Fiedler
August 1, 1998:
DNS Expert:
While not specifically a Web development tool, Men and Mice' DNS Expert can be an effective tool for developers trying to track down potential DNS problems with their Web site. The tool provides complete, systematic analysis of your site's DNS records, isolates any errors and provides solutions to what can tend to be a very daunting problem, and does not require any Unix knowledge to operate!
-- S. Clark
June 19, 1998:
Macromedia Fireworks:
This comprehensive tool can do just about everything, and will especially appeal to professional graphics designers. Fireworks doesn't have half the learning curve of Photoshop, yet rivals it for sheer power (and beats it for Web-related work). The new slicing, tweening, and JavaScript rollover features might be worth the price alone.
-- David Fiedler
Ulead PhotoImpact:
If you're on a budget, don't spend all of your time tweaking pixels, or don't want to, we can't think of any better way to spend $100 on a graphics program. The SmartSaver becomes part of your Explorer menu, and the effects, button and background designers match or beat any of the other products tested. Highly recommended.
-- David Fiedler
Micrografx Webtricity:
Picture Publisher, the main attraction in this quartet of tools, has professional features like Fireworks and wizards and ease of use like Photoimpact, as well as some all its own such as Light Studio. Simply 3D has its own wizards, so you don't have to be a full-time artist to create serious 3D scenes as GIF animations or VRML. Windows Draw is a vector program, to help round out the offering. If this package was integrated a bit better, Micrografx might have the top honors here, but there's very little you can't do with these programs.
-- David Fiedler
May 11, 1998:
Leon McCalla
for his
BindNT/95
Web site.
If you want to replace your Unix server with Windows NT, you will quickly find that running a good DNS server will cost you several hundred dollars for a third-party product. What you won't find (unless you look very hard) is this free version, which was ported from the original Unix version by a number of people for Windows NT and 95. Leon McCalla runs the semi-official Web site for this port, and it's about the best source of information on how to get things running. Just be careful of the built-in defaults.
BTW, Leon also has a number of handy networking tips and tricks on his home page...like how to route IP via Win95.
-- David Fiedler
May 1, 1998:
Component Software
for their
CSDiff
product.
A long time ago, somewhat after the dawn of history (but still several years before IBM would stop laughing at the concept of personal computers), I got my first programming job at a Large Insurance Company That Shall Remain Nameless. Here I was right out of college, and these fools were letting me play around with their corporate master data files. In System/370 assembler code, yet.
Just to give you an idea how long ago this was, the old-line programming managers were very skeptical of new-fangled innovations like CRT terminals (my direct supervisor was convinced they were tools of the devil himself, since in her view all right-thinking programmers should use punch cards...like she did). And when it came time to make changes to their precious code, they had a quaint ritual: all the programmers involved would gather in the manager's office, and we would go over two listings held next to each other, line by line, with a ruler.
Don't get me wrong; even then, there were programs that produced "difference" listings. They just didn't trust such frippery. And after all, they had to justify their miserable, COBOL-ridden existence somehow. They made my life miserable, of course, but revenge will be mine in the long run. The company clearly has less than two years to live, despite their hundred-plus-year-old heritage:
The idiots coded part of the insurance policy date in binary, and part in BCD, and stored them in different places in each record,
to save two bytes of space per customer.
They'll never make it past 1999.
All this is simply a leadin to Component Software's excellent, and totally free, Windows program CSDiff, which will take any two files and neatly show you how one was changed to make the other. It's based on a port of the Unix diff utility, to be sure, but it also has handy features like drag-and-drop, and if you forgot "which is which", it can look at the dates and assume that the older file was first.
I don't believe you can use Unix diff on Microsoft Word files, but you can with CSDiff, and though it's intended for programmers, it works just dandy on HTML files. It's also intelligent enough to give you the minimum output you need, so you don't get overwhelmed with lines full of useless information.
CSDiff comes packaged with a copy of the company's CS-RCS product, which is a Windows-based GNU port of Unix RCS (Revision Control System). If you're not familiar with RCS, it gives you the ability to store files (source or binary) in a central archive where you can check them in or out (like library books). This makes sure nobody else is working on a file while you are. and makes it possible for you to see every change that's been made to a file between checkouts.
You can also retrieve any intermediate revision any time (i.e. "finding one that still worked").
CS-RCS is free for single-user use, and in a multiuser networked environment, will work with Unix and Windows files virtually transparently. It's reasonably-priced, so check it out.
-- David Fiedler
P.S. Even though there's a standalone version of CSDiff, I still recommend picking up the file with CS-RCS included, because I had some problems running the standalone version.
April 17, 1998:
RealNetworks
for their
RealEncoders,
RealServer,
and
RealPlayer
products.
In a world of multi-zillion-dollar marketing budgets and giant companies built on shareware alone, it takes a lot of guts to give away your basic products free. It takes a vision even more powerful to do that while creating a brand new genre of products -- which means creating and evangelizing the market -- and making your products such high quality that companies gladly buy the higher-end versions.
And it takes a truly unique company to do this in Microsoft's backyard, get Microsoft to invest in them, then compete head-to-head with Microsoft...and beat them in the marketplace.
RealNetworks has done all that while becoming the de facto standard of streaming media. Their products are true "must haves" for anyone thinking of using multimedia on their Web site.
-- David Fiedler
April 10, 1998:
Bill Oatman for his
SpyCam
product.
You know those nifty little "Web Cams" that seem to appear almost everywhere? If not, check this Yahoo link out and you'll be amazed at what you've been missing. To run one of these yourself, you'll need three things: a camera, a Web server, and a piece of software to update it regularly.
Now, probably the most common camera connected to the Web is one version or other of the Connectix QuickCam. While the QuickCam comes with software that can take regular "snapshots" and save them to local files on your hard disk, this will only allow you to implement a complete Web cam if you happen to be running a Windows NT-based server on the same machine.
SpyCam runs on any Windows 95 or NT system, supports virtually any image capture device (not just the QuickCam) and automatically uploads the picture files to a file on your Web server, even if it has to dial the phone itself. Everything is configurable, and SpyCam even seems to run more efficiently than the Connectix software itself. If this weren't enough, SpyCam is free!
-- David Fiedler
April 3, 1998:
Aerosoft for their
NetLoad product.
NetLoad is the kind of product not everyone needs, but if you do
have a use for it, you're going to be happy you found out about it.
What it does, very simply and quickly, is make a mirror of a Web site (or any set of directories) from a Windows machine. You can design and keep your site on your local computer and upload only recently changed files to your Web server. Or, you can keep a local backup of your Web site on your home computer.
For those with multiple sites, it will handle them with ease. One of its best features is its intelligent dating, where it will keep track of the latest file changes and just down- or upload the necessary files, even if your remote machine is several time zones away. You can decide to filter out, say, all image files (with .JPG or .GIF extensions) and not mirror those if you want.
There are a number of competing products on the market, but NetLoad is by far the fastest and most intuitive I've found...and if you work at 4 A.M. the way I do sometimes, you really do want something that works the way you expect it to. I've been using NetLoad for months now to manage WebDeveloper.com, and find it invaluable.
-- David Fiedler
March 28, 1998:
Dallas Semiconductor for their
Java Ring/iButton product.
I can't tell you how excited I am about the potential for the Java Ring technology (actually, I already did :-). But let me just touch on the highlights here:
- it's a ring (OK, it's a 16 mm. stainless steel capsule embedded in a ring)
- waterproof, tamperproof million-transistor CPU
- 6 KB of nonvolatile RAM
- runs a V2.0 Java Virtual Machine
- can do a 1024-bit RSA encryption in less than a second
- interfaces by touching a single contact
- it's a ring
OK, OK. Greatest thing since sliced bread, and all that. I don't use the word "sexy" to refer to technology (there are much more interesting and appropriate uses for that word :-), but if any piece of hardware deserves that label, this is it. Think of it as an indestructible, intimately worn Java computer just waiting for you to think up applications for it.
-- David Fiedler
March 20, 1998:
Kaylon Technologies for their
Powermarks product
I am pleased to give our very first product award to Kaylon for Powermarks.
I've tried all kinds of hierarchical filing systems for keeping track of my links, bookmarks, and favorites. All of them had some flaw or other, or were too slow to use. And when you switch back and forth between browsers, you tend to lose your markers.
I've been using Powermarks for well over a year exclusively, and it's terrific. You can add a URL to the database with a single click, and you search by just typing keywords...Powermarks will find matches while you're still typing. Then just click to launch your browser with the URL (of course it's smart enough not to launch an extra browser if one's already running!).
Powermarks automatically imports your favorites from Microsoft Internet Explorer and your bookmarks from Netscape Navigator, and saves everything in a plain HTML file: no proprietary formats, thank you!
For someone like me, who spends much of his time on the Web, the ability to quickly find a site -- that I might have visited once a year or so before -- can save hours of searching.
I have over 3000 URLs stored in Powermarks, and I back it up as often as my system registry. That's how important it is to me. Try Powermarks...it was done right!
-- David Fiedler
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