Have you ever wanted to edit your website when you’re away from your computer? Perhaps you’ve been sitting on the train and seen a sneaky spelling error on one of your pages or you’ve finally decided on a hexadecimal code that would give you the perfect background colour. HTML Writer lets you make these tweaks from your phone.
This application is definitely aimed at those who already know the difference between a <tr> and a <br>. There’s no WYSIWYG editor here and no explanations for beginners, but there are quick insert buttons that allow the experienced web developer to open and close popular tags, or add in particular attributes or snippets of code. You can use these tools as you edit a file or, if you have a lot of time/can type quickly on your iPhone, create a page from scratch.
However, the functionality doesn’t end there. There are also a number of well thought-out extras that make this application a very helpful tool for website developers. These include previewing your edited pages before they’re released to the internet, accessing and uploading photos you’ve taken on your phone, emailing your finished files, and downloading the source code from any web page.
The application also allows FTP access to your website host. However, while testing it I found that I could only download and upload files in my root directory. Whenever I tried to drill down to the HTML files in my sub-folders, I got a message saying ‘connection failed’. Perhaps there’s a setting I could change if I had greater knowledge of how these things work, however it’s not a problem I’ve had with any other FTP client however and, for me, it limits the usefulness of an otherwise excellent application.
If you’re building a website from scratch or wanting to make lots of coding changes to an existing one, in front of the computer is probably still the best place to be. But if you’ve got a simple website and you want to make simple edits to its pages while you’re out and about, then this is the application for you.
