Symphony.

As a Mac user, I have periodically browsed macupdate.com for an XML editor native to the OSX. Last week I discovered Xmplify. It is in beta, but appears to be fairly complete. So far, I have only used it for an XML print project, but it looks like it could fill all my XSLT needs outside the Symphony interface, and take the place of the AquaPath, skEdit, XSLTPalette tool cluster I have been using. I thought there might be Mac-owning Symphonians who might want to check it out.

@FredD - Thanks for sharing. I’ll be sure to check that out. Very cool.

Just out of curiosity, have you ever tried Coda? It doesn’t have built-in code hinting for XSLT but once you create the necessary clips it becomes irrelevant.

I have looked both at Coda and Espresso, but there wasn’t much of a compelling reason to shift from skEdit for html/xslt editing. skEdit does not support autohinting for xslt tags out of the box, but I have handrolled additional values into its default HTML bundle for the tags I use most.

skEdit enables you to work on a local copy that automatically uploads to the server on save, so I find myself editing a Symphony site’s XSLT utilities and pages in skEdit and then checking it with a web browser.

What I am hoping Xmplify will do for me in the context of Symphony is help with figuring out xpaths and looking at the XML the Symphony backend produces, to figure out how I want to process it. I also have begun to use XML/XSLT in the context of getting information out of InDesign documents I design in the day job, which means doing transforms outside the scope of Symphony …

It was quite breath taking to click a button and have Xmplify spit out a schema for an XML document which InDesign exported sans dtd or schema. Now if I could just get translators to edit the XML instead of creating Word documents which I have to decypher when doing producing the non-English translations of existing documents.

Now if I could just get translators to edit the XML

Take a look at the google translate toolkit, a great tool for translators, they can share the result with your account, and then you can download it in an xml standard

I can’t wean myself off Textmate, it’s too easy.

google translate toolkit

Thanks, I have had a look, though XML is not directly supported, XHTML OpenDocument might be transformable to produce the right kind of XML to reimport into InDesign.

Supported File Types

• AdWords Editor Archive (.aea)
• HTML (.html)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• OpenDocument Text (.odt)
• Plain Text (.txt)
• Rich Text (.rtf)
• SubRip (.srt)
• SubViewer (.sub)

These file types are the source files, but you can export the result, and your dictionary in some kind of xml standard.

Also transiflex might be of use, but its more focussed on strings I think, not on content?

I use Aptana Studio for XSLT editing, it works pretty good.

@bd_creations java based IDEs make baby Tim Berners-Lee cry. Actually, nix that - Java user interfaces make me cry. They’re up there with Qt and Flash desktop apps for terrible “cross platform” user experiences.

While we’re all tooting about our own editors of choice: Personally, I’m a huge fan of MacRabbit’s Espresso for XML editing. It’s clean, fast and the networking functions are super, super fast. I like the extensibility too - if something’s missing, just write a sugar.

That reminds me, I promised I would write a blog post about setting up a good web development install under Snow Leopard. I should do that to back up my wild allegations of Espresso rocking.

Java user interfaces make me cry

There are a number of good XML editors written in Java and similarly Aptana Studio is a terrific program …and yet to me they just don’t feel right, just not cute enough. Shallow of me, I know.

Xmplify has had two updates since I first posted on the 17th.

@tonyarnold
Looking forward to that writeup. What I miss in espresso is a live markdown preview, even the convert from markdown doesn’t work anymore since I updated.