One click is all it takes to publish for the web
While companies such as Adobe, Claris, and GoLive have been constantly working to keep their WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) web creation tools up-to-date and full of features, Terry Morse has been quietly sitting back and letting his ingenious creation, Myrmidon, become more popular as time goes on. Rather than having to create pages for the web in a slow and tedious environment (like Pagemill) or an overly complex one (like Cyberstudio), Myrmidon gives the user the flexibility to publish for the web using virtually any application they wish.
Myrmidon is selected through the chooser and becomes your "Printer" then publishes a web-ready equivalent of the chosen document through that application's "Print" command, like with the PDF writer or fax software. Text retains its formatting (tabs, paragraphs, etc.) and graphics remain in their original positions. Complex documents, such as a PageMaker document, are turned into a handful of a well-compressed 
GIFs which are cleverly lined up to create an online representation of what is seen within PageMaker.
When it comes to creating documents for the web that contain special formatting, several columns, or any text alterations, Myrmidon really shines. By using graphics as place holders, converting a spread sheet to a table, or turning text into GIFs, Myrmidon effectively and effortlessly allows the average user to stick whatever they want on the web without knowing the slightest thing about HTML.
Although Myrmidon will create a web-ready duplicate of virtually any document, understanding HTML is a definite plus. For example, a greyscale 200x100 pixel graphic was converted to a 20x10 GIF, and then enlarged 10x to fill the same space, obviously with a very pixilated look. But saving the graphic as a separate file and giving it the same name Myrmidon did remedied this problem. Also, because an exact copy of a document is created, Myrmidon won't wrap text to the size of the web browsing screen, but rather to the width that it was created on in a document, regardless of whether carriage returns were used or not.
While Myrmidon can't create eye catching sites with images maps, scrolling text, and other fancy HTML items, it makes rudimentary tasks, such as preparing a business report for the web, simple, and opens a whole new door for casual users wishing to put a newsletter on the web or their work for the world to see.
Myrmidon is a truly innovative addition that does a fine job of recreating documents for the web. If used in conjunction with a powerful site creation tool like BBEdit or Pagemill, entire sites can be created with ease and minimum hassle. Either way, with Myrmidon, anyone can get a whole lot of work up on the web in lot less time that it used to take.
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 SRP: $69.99; Edu. pricing: $39.99 |