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Of course I'm upgrading from 3.01 :) so I'm sure I'll see some value!
Homesite 4.52 has served me very well and I was bustin' down page after page with it. But after working with v.5 these last few weeks, it has got me hooked with the refinements and extras.
First XHTML handling is complete. I was getting just a little annoyed at 4.52 whenever I "closed" an "open" break or horizontal rule only to have HS toss me a warning message.
The thumbnail viewer is very handy as are the extra site management tabs. Homesite's tag editors have been refined as well, overall this is still the best editor I have ever used. And to think, I when I first got Dreamweaver a few years back, I actually thought Homesite was just a "throw-in" and barely gave it a nod. Now I have to remember how to even use Dreamweaver... but come to think of it, I don't.
Tedster... you are in for a treat! ;)
Ditto. I want too much control over my code to use DW - I uninstalled it in about 6 months. But Homesite is like my right arm. I've even configured Opera to open Homesite for "View Source"
Homesite is why I find it so very easy to write my CSS directly to my page as I "build." I move it upstairs when I am done... The control is always there.
OK, I think I'll order it. This is probably one of those posts were Brett is frantically checking that we don't work for Macromedia :)
What is really refreshing, is that we are finally at a point where every other site is not some "wack" flash fiasco. For the time being, it appears that the majority of Flash creations are being used for optional presentations, or animated story boards. I can live with those because I do not have to be bothered with them if I so choose.
I love the integration with my other favorite tools -- TopStyle, HTML Tidy, CSE HTML Validator. The customizability of HTML validation with CSE is astounding.
The color coding of the HTML is up a notch -- it dynamically changes in a way that lets me know when I start to go south.
The interface has two changes I struggle with. One is closing the validation results on the left side instead of the right. But that's minor - many other little things have been done to speed the workflow.
The other change I don't care for is splitting "Extended Search" and Extended Replace" into separate functions. Since you can't "undo" an Extended Replace, I assume this is a safeguard against accidentally hitting the Replace button when you only wanted to Search. But it complicates things a bit.
Although I never had the difficulty, it still apparently has the resource hogging problem on Win 9x/Me machines. There is a resource monitor in the settings that will warn you if it is about to crash and burn so you can save your work! Can't fix the problem? Work around it! Woo hoo!
Also, the question "When does 5.5 come out" perhaps would be better phrased "Will there be a 5.5?" There is an awful lot of Homesite in the code view of DreamweaverMX, and it wouldn't be to surprising (to my cynical mind, at least) if they deep-sixed Homesite in lieu of their new WYSIWYG, resource-eating monster.
Anyway, you can bet it will be called Homesite MX if it does show up.
On the other hand, 2 years ago I was sure they were going to ditch Authorware, but it's still going!
P_M, I sure hope you are right. I'm not too hugely impressed with Dreamweaver MX, even considering that I use both UltraDev and Homesite. IMHO, the DreamWeaver/Homesite integration walks just this side of the line of bloatware (where a product has features that should be in two seperate programs).
I personally am hoping for a maintenance update to Homesite 5 to repair some of its bugs and to add things like XSL tag support and maybe actually opening the full version of Topstyle (if you own it) when editing inline styles with the tag editor.
