Flux Version 3

Bottom Line

Flux is an interesting web page editor. While it took me a bit longer to figure out how to use it, once I understood, I found it very fun to use. It’s WYSIWYG, but each element has a visible icon defining it right on the WYSIWYG page. This gives you something to grab onto for CSS styles and just to move the element to different locations on the page.

This review was written on October 10, 2011.

Pros

• Easy and fun to use WYSIWYG editor
• Writes valid HTML5 and CSS3
• Includes both a built-in preview and a live preview (once you’ve connected it to a web server)
• Can edit the HTML code both as the complete document and just looking at small sections of the page

Cons

• HTML editor is small and can be hard to read. You can resize it, but it never felt very robust to me.
• There is little or no support for mobile web page development
• I could not figure out how to do search and replace
• And there is no

Description

• Flux is a text and WYSIWYG editor for Macintosh.
• Flux costs $119.99USD and is available on the Apple app store, there is also upgrade pricing available on their website.
• Try out Flux with the 30-day free trial.

At first glance this seems like a typical WYSIWYG editor. It has all the features you expect of a WYSIWYG editor: drag-and-drop functions, resize elements visually, position your page elements where you want them on the page, change colors, fonts, and styles and see the changes directly on the page. But what’s nice is that rather than relying solely on DIV elements Flux incorporates HTML5 elements like HEADER, ARTICLE, and FIGURE. And the HTML Flux generates is valid HTML5.

Built-In Dynamic Websites

Flux includes a lot of features that make it easy to create dynamic websites. There is an “actions and widgets” button right on the toolbar that gives you access to fancy styles like:

• complex tables
• speech bubbles
• CSS menus
• contact forms

Plus, you can add in actions to your site from the same menu, to create interactive elements like:

• calendars
• progress bars
• sliders
• image galleries
• maps (with Google Maps)
• and more…

Made for Designers

This editor is built for designers to use to create sites that would normally need a developer to create. As a designer you can pay attention to the colors, layout, and typography of the page, and then use the wizards and widgets to add in the programmatic features that would otherwise be added by a developer. One feature that many designers will appreciate is the color tool. You can create a color palette for your project and then assign the colors to your elements based on that palette. As someone who is constantly scrambling to remember the exact codes for the colors in my palettes I really appreciate that the colors show up right in the CSS editor.

Another great feature related to colors that Flux has is the ability to download and incorporate Colour Lovers palettes. If you have created or found a palette of colors on the Colour Lovers website that you like, you can import it directly into Flux for use on your websites. And don’t worry about filling up Flux with tons of color palettes and then being overwhelmed by them in the CSS editor. You can choose which palettes you want to display for each of your sites, and you can choose multiple palettes to display so that you have an even wider variety of pre-sorted colors without needing to get out the RGB/Hex converter.

The Code Editing Has Good and Bad Points

The default text editor (code editor) in Flux uses TextEdit to display and edit the HTML, or you can change the editor to point to your favorite HTML text editor in the preferences pane. One of my favorite features is that Flux will open the text editor to just the section or element you are working on, leaving you distraction free to change just that part of the page. You can also see the entire HTML page in the code editor, with the parts you’re working on highlighted.

There are some features missing, however. It doesn’t have tag completion or HTML validation, both features I consider important to writing good HTML code.

Flux is a Powerful Tool for Small Business Owners

One use that I can see for Flux is for small business owners to really take control over their websites. Because it is primarily WYSIWYG, it’s easy to update pages and make them look good without knowing a lot of HTML or CSS. And the built-in widgets let even non-programmers add dynamic elements without a lot of effort.

Flux got three stars because it misses features I feel are essential for a professional web developer, but even still it is hard not to like this editor.