Web/HTML editors that won't die

I may be a little late to the party in discussing this, but I just came across some info on the MS Office website about FrontPage going away. It's not surprising with the release of MS Expression Web, but it's been around for so long I thought it would never go away. After all, Adobe recently released a new version of GoLive! (I will never understand.) However, MS appears to be reincarnating FrontPage as SharePoint Designer, the new tool for designing and customizing SharePoint pages.

For those who haven't had the joy of working with SharePoint, you have to use Front Page to edit Sharepoint pages (beyond the built in tools) because of how everything is stored in the database. "Normal" web editor tools don't understand SharePoint-ese. SharePoint is the only reason I had FrontPage on my computer at my last job.

As much as I <3 Sharepoint, it sort of irks me that I have to buy a separate tool to modify HTML and CSS for it when I have thousands of dollars worth of other software designed just for that already on my machine. (Speaking of which, after about 3 days of use, I have determined that SharePoint 3.0 rocks.)

I was never much of a FrontPage fan otherwise (as soon as I had to write any substantial amount of HTML I snagged myself some Dreamweaver 3.0), but I thought I would never see the day that FrontPage dies, and here we are... where are the tears?

Speaking of dead software, CFMX 6.1 has been EOL'd...how about that?! That actually seemed soon to me, but then again I'm not sure how long they typically keep these products around. From what I have read it seems to be a very good decision. I always like being on the bleeding edge of software versions, and I hate to think of all the time that goes to maintaining old versions that could be put towards new features. Or those poor developers who work on products that have been replaced by newer and better products within the same company...

So here's to euthanizing old software!

Apollo is Now AIR (and in Beta!)

Last week I finally got around to poking around in Apollo, and I'm really excited about it. I went back today, and it's now called Air, and in Beta! Super Cool.

Air

I'm going to use it to deploy a Flex application to desktop at my company. This particular application was originally "dreamed" to be everyone's desktop. Not ON everyone's desktop, but their actual desktop (the vision was that everyone would have it open all the time). Being able to have it on the desktop without a browser is going to be great for us. My users have also requested system tray notifications, so I'm looking forward to learning more about that with Air. I'll make updates as I figure it out :)