[re-sift] Marimba madness has continued non-stop since our October 18th column about the upstart pro-Java company. Their press release page reads like a "who's who" in the world of Internet companies with the likes of Netscape, Macromedia, Apple, and Corel all signing on to provide portions of Marimba's "push" technology.

All companies involved subscribe to Marimba's idea for restructuring the channel in which software is distributed. Rather than running down to Fry's to get the latest version of WordPerfect, all you need is Marimba's Castanet Tuner to pull down a version and monitor when new versions become available.  Throw in secure transactions for easy credit card payments and the only reason you'll need to go to Fry's is their killer selection of candy and electronic doo-hickeys.

Most noticeable in the Marimba applet suite is Corel's new Office for Java application. With a simple click, you can download the six megabyte Java application which gives you WordPerfect, Quattro Pro and a personal information manager. Corel has made an effort to make the "applets" look like their PC equivalents, but considering that Office for Java is six megabytes, as opposed to the several hundred megabyte PC version, users must be wondering what features aren't implemented.

The Castanet Tuner has completed its Beta cycle and acquired the title of 1.0, but hasn't grown with its new found notoriety. An abundance of channels exists, each with an array of applets. Unfortunately, however, there does not appear to be a way to search the applets for a tool users might actually use.

Performance is another major hindrance to Marimba's wares. On the Bitsifter Pentium Pro 200Mhz machine, the Office for Java applet represented decent performance, but the majority of the world is going to find nothing but frustration. Java applets are slow to load and to run on low-end Pentiums.

Marimba has a firm grasp of the what the future holds for computers equipped with high speed connections and processors. Unfortunately, the future isn't here, yet.

[re-sift] The jump from the text based world of Wordstar word processing to Windows took almost two years. It was the classic quandary: Speed or power? In Wordstar, the cursor never lagged behind my 80 words per minute, but one never knew what the final document would resemble when it was printed. In Microsoft Word, I could type faster than Windows would respond on my PC-AT, but the glamour of variable width fonts, graphics, and the promise of what-you-see-is-what-you-get kept me coming back to the Graphical User Interface.

The evolution of the HTML editor has closely followed that of the word processor. The first and best tools out the door where mostly just glorified text editors. If you wanted to see what your raw HTML code looked like, you used your browser. Value was added by providing easy ways to insert HTML tags or check for syntax errors, but it was mostly a text-based world until the arrival of NetObjects Fusion six months ago.

Keeping with Internet development cycles, the 2.0 version of Fusion entered public Beta just 90 days after the release of 1.0. The increasingly crowed market of WYSIWIG HTML editors has left Fusion undaunted. As mentioned in an earlier column, Fusion wins the award for best of breed by our standards. Features added in 2.0 include support for frames, a site import tool, mini-applets, and MasterBorders (a fancy name for a simple idea called templates).

The kamikaze web site designer would most likely avoid Fusion 1.0 mostly because the program gave the impression that it had it's users best interests at heart -- forcing a look or style on the designer. Not so with 2.0. The newest version encourages inventiveness by providing open-ended tools that acknowledge the fact that you can never tell what someone is going to do when they're creative. Granted, 2.0 still doesn't allow ready access to raw HTML via the interface , but the high degree of control available via Fusion's intelligently designed property dialogs is without equal.

Other tools on the market still sell the idea of text-based editors as the power user tool, but even power users want to see what they're creating.