It’s one thing to charge for add-ons, but making users pay for the manual is unfair, uncool, & user-unfriendly. It’s described thusly: “The missing Users’s Manual for BlueGriffon… We finally have one!” Yes, there has never been a manual for the software. Developers have the right to make money from their software, & charging money for add-ons is time-tested method to do so (although I think some of those costs are excessive & would never pay them 2).īut today I noticed a new add-on: a User’s Manual. Now, I have absolutely no problem with BlueGriffon charging money for add-ons. The software itself is free, as are several add-ons 1, but the other add-ons cost money. I needed to create a table today, so I downloaded BlueGriffon. Sure, I could do it in HTML, but it’s a PITA, so instead I open BlueGriffon & use that. In my case, I use BlueGriffon when I need to generate a big, confusing table.
If, however, you just have no money at all, or you’ve a devotee of open source & refuse to use closed source software, or if you just need a WYSIWYG for a very specific purpose. The best WYSIWYG by far is Dreamweaver, which pains me to say since it is expensive & owned by Adobe, who like to exploit the users of their software to squeeze every penny. I know HTML & CSS quite well, so I don’t need a WYSIWYG, but I know WYSIWYGs for creating webpages-I have to in order to teach my courses at Washington University in St. Like the others, it’s written with Mozilla & XUL. Now the latest on the scene is BlueGriffon, developed by the same guy who wrote Nvu. It’s still around, but it’s not something I would recommend. Then that was followed by KompoZer, a community-driven fork of Nvu that fixed a few things in Nvu but was still just fair to middling. Then it was followed by Nvu, an open fork of Composer that was slightly better but didn’t set the world on fire. BlueGriffon is SELLING its user manual, & that’s bullshitįirst there was Netscape Composer, a WYSIWYG for creating webpages that was part of the Netscape suite.