Dexter's Creator On A Home Run
The Age
Monday April 14, 1997
THIS column's very favorite piece of software, the Homesite Web page editor, exists largely because cartoonists draw such lousy wages. American Nick Bradbury penned cartoons for his college newspaper, and then for a local newspaper. His favorite was a strip called Dexter. But as he puts it, "the pay was so bad that I had to work at a deli on the side in order to keep a roof over my head".
When he moved to Washington, Bradbury swapped the salami counter for a temporary job in computing, and found himself hooked.
When the Web phenomenon arrived in 1995, Bradbury, then 27, decided to put those Dexter cartoons online. At the time, plenty of Web site creators used simple text editors such as Windows Notepad to write their HTML (HyperText Markup Language, the language Web browsers speak).
No-code Web publishers such as Microsoft's Frontpage were still on the drawing boards, but HTML-writing assistants such as Hot Dog were popping up. Bradbury editioned all of them, and didn't like what he saw. So he sat down with a copy of Borland's then shiny new programming software, Delphi 2.0, and wrote his own Web editor.
Nick Bradbury had long mused about eventually writing commercial software. "But funnily enough," he reflects now, "I didn't really write HomeSite with this in mind. I really did start off just writing something for myself."
From the day it sneaked on to the Internet - April 21, 1996 - HomeSite gained followers fast. Some had struggled with the annoying eccentricities of the leading Web editor, Melbourne-based Sausage Software's pioneering Hot Dog.
Many admired the speed with which Bradbury, a lightning-fast code writer, improved his product; new, free and perfectly stable updates often appeared just weeks after their predecessors, brandishing new features such as spell-checking, extended search-and-replace and undo, and impressive JavaScript support.
While you worked in the simple HTML code, you could check your pages' appearance almost instantly in an internal browser. Bradbury, a one-man operation, made a point of expanding his program by integrating other freeware and shareware tools, such as the CSE 3310 HTML Validator and Microsoft's Web Publishing Wizard.
The product has always been astonishingly cheap. Version 1.2 remains a free download, and even after recent price rises, less than $US50 (payable by credit card over the Net) buys you registration of the more powerful version 2.0 and the right to install Bradbury's never-ending series of updates.
But most of all, HomeSite has always made its users feel at home. Bradbury built his program around a multi-tabbed toolbar which put all the basics on big, clear buttons.
Hot Dog now features a tabbed interface rather like HomeSite's, just as Bradbury's internal browser has created an automatic page previewer just like Hot Dog's.
But the sheer pleasure of using HomeSite has defied its rivals' attempts at mimicry. Says Bradbury: "The user interface is by far the most important part of any piece of software, but I don't think the developer community fully realises this yet."
Comments at Web discussion forums such as Stroud's shareware list confirm that users see it his way - and with unusual loyalty. While you might think cartoonist Bradbury's artistic instincts and training lie behind HomeSite's sweet interface, the man himself, though, traces his concentration on ease-of-use back to his first job in computing.
'FOR almost a year," he recalls, "I spent several hours a day working with this terrible interface, and during those hours it became my work environment. This bad interface actually affected my quality of life. I would go home frustrated after wrestling with the thing."
In some recent better versions of HomeSite, a series of unpublished keystrokes triggered a short, aggressive animation - the HomeSite logo dropping down to squash Hot Dog's canine mascot.
But Bradbury sees shareware like Hot Dog as yesterday's competition. Simple Web page creation is now a task mainly for no-code Web publishers from software giants such as Microsoft, Corel and Adobe.
"If all you want to do is quickly put together a set of pages, something like FrontPage is a better choice than HomeSite," Bradbury notes. Tools such as HomeSite remain essential for Web authors wanting real control over their pages. But to keep growing, HomeSite will have to support ever more sophisticated Website needs, such as corporate database integration, its obvious shortcoming.
In less than a year, the Web has made the former deli assistant . . . well, perhaps not rich, but "quite comfortable". "The Internet really levels the playing field, so that people who create programs out of their apartments can compete with the 'big guys'. The cost of distribution, which used to keep most people out of the market, is now negligible."
But one-man operations can't go on forever. Running the HomeSite business was robbing Bradbury of the time to improve his product. So in March, Bradbury lived the 1990s independent software creator's dream and sold HomeSite for an undisclosed sum to Allaire, creator of the Cold Fusion Web database program.
Bradbury will keep developing HomeSite. His users are hoping it will retain its remarkable charm. You can find links to the HomeSite together with an extended version of this article, at Lighthouse on the Web at http://werple.net.au/dwalker/
© 1997 The Age