HotDog 5.5 Professional Webmaster Suite

Reviewed by: Doug Reed, send e-mail
Published by: Sausage Software, go to the web site
Requires: Win 95/98, Pentium, 32+ MB RAM recommended
MSRP: Stand-Alone $129.95, Supertoolz Value Pack $99.95,
Hot Dog 5.5 Professional Webmaster Suite (includes stand-alone,
supertoolz, and partner applications) $199.95

HotDog 5.5 is a popular, full-featured HTML editor from Sausage Software, based out of Australia. This latest version comes in a variety of flavors, from a standalone editor up to a complete "Webmaster Suite" that includes a variety of 'Toolz" and partner applications from other vendors. HotDog certainly kept up with the latest and greatest products from other vendors; all the tools and implements that one could wish for are here. The sum of all the components would make the Suite worth the price even if the editor itself were no good. Lucky for Sausage, then, that the editor is topnotch, making this a product worthy of serious consideration by any web designer, professional or otherwise.

Installation

All Sausage software is downloaded from their website or a variety of mirror sites worldwide (including Download.com). The Webmaster Suite is four separate downloads: 1) the HotDog editor, 2) HotDog Express for beginners, 3) the Partner applications and 4) the Supertoolz value pack. So unless you have access to a fast connection, be prepared for all of this to take a while to download. Unlike so many of its competitors, however, you have thirty days to try out HotDog before you have to buy it. By the time you should be convinced.

Featuritis

The HotDog Suite comes with the sixteen Supertoolz and three partner applications which separately would be worth more than the cost of the whole Suite. The Supertoolz pack is a variety of small, special application utilities for such purposes as downloading websites, reducing bandwidth, or creating a web channel for use with Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Collectively, here are the seventeen tools:

Bandwidth Buster, MultiFile Find and Replace Wizard, Channel Wizard, Real Audio-Video, SuperTool, ICQ Panel Wizard, Reptile Image Mapper, SafeSurf Web Content Rating Wizard, ImageLab, Table Editor, Jack Hammer, Text Effects, Java Animator, Web Downloader, JavaScript Tools, LinkExchange, Add Banner Wizard.

The three partner applications are: Paintshop Pro (a graphics editor), Linkbot (a link checker), and mBed Interactor Lite (a dynamic HMTL scriptor). As you can see from this list of tools and applications, everything that a web designer could wish for is included. These are destined to make your life a lot easier, especially if you work on your own designing web sites.

Day-to-day

So HotDog has all these features, but is it easy to use? By and large, yes. The basic interface in HotDog is a little on the cluttered side, but it has everything you need and can be customized to remove what you don't. The center of the screen contains the actual HTML editor, as well as tabs to various toolbars and the partner applications. The editor screen is color coded, so that HTML tags and code are easily distinguished from the text. Below the editor screen is a second view of the page, showing you what the current page design would look like. While a nice idea, it doesn't work well. For one thing, you would want to preview the page in Netscape and IE (at the very least!). For another, the view doesn't stretch the width of the your screen, so text will end up wrapping when on the final page it might not. On the left hand side of the editor screen is a screen that can alternately display a links to the Supertoolz, a clipboard, or an HTML 4.0 reference, explaining each of the tags and how they are used. As you edit the page, the dictionary jumps to whatever tag you are currently adding - very nice! On the right-hand side of the editor screen is a HTML tag list, which you can click on to add the tag (unless, like me, you'd rather type it in).

HotDog WebMaster Suite is the ultimate compilation of tools for do-it-yourself web masters. The SuperToolz are worth the price of the whole package, especially with the Java animator, JavaScript tools, channel wizard, the web downloader and the multifile find & replace wizard. It certainly will save you the time needed to learn how to do it yourself or the expense of hiring someone else to do it. The interface is everything you could possibly hope for in an HTML editor, especially with the HTML 4.0 reference. Do you need any additional reasons to try it out?

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