Thursday 7 December 2006

, , ,

Botched with NVU

Oddly enough you can't snag a show-your-support badge like this from the NVU home page, only the 'made with' ones.

NVU is a streamlined, free alternative to the clunky Dreamweaver WYSIWYG HTML editor. Sounds great in theory doesn't it. In practice it's wonkier than a drunken giraffe bowlegged with rickets, totally incapable of performing the simplest of tasks - inserting a *gasp* ...table for instance.
It can't be argued that the glaring gremlins in this crippleware were unknown; people have been posting (and ranting) about them on the official support forum for eons. Nevertheless, there hasn't been the merest whiff of a bug fix release since June 2005 - in fact the project seems to have been cut adrift by all concerned.

Given this lack of activity you'd think the developer would be delighted to see someone breathing new life into NVU without asking for anything in return. But no, Kaze has offended his delicate sensibilities by taking what is essentially the stub of a promising open source project, improving it and re-distributing the code for the community at large to benefit from. Shame on him, dissin' the spirit of the open source movement like that!

From now on each time I press a button or write a chunk of code in KompoZer and it does precisely what I expect it to I'll adopt a steely gaze, shake my fist and curse that menace to society.

0 comments: