Loma Prieta Finds a Home at Claris

Careful MacWEEK readers might have noticed an article a few weeks ago about Loma Prieta, an up-and-coming Web authoring tool positioned to give Adobe’s PageMill some serious competition. Created by San Andreas Systems, Loma Prieta is not in public beta, and beta testers have been tight-lipped about the program.

Additional information became available for public consumption last week, in the form of a press release stating that Claris has acquired Loma Prieta, and plans to release the program as Claris Home Page. According to the press release, Claris Home Page will be a cross-platform product with versions coming out for the Mac OS, Windows 95, and Windows NT. The program will help users create a variety of high-end elements, including tables and frames, in either an HTML view or a visual view. Helpfully, Claris Home Page should also offer libraries, in which users can store commonly repeated chunks of HTML. The press release included numerous quotes lauding Claris for its emphasis on creating easy-to-use software and emphasizing that Claris Home Page would make it easy to create high-end Web pages. Not surprisingly, the press release said nothing about Claris’s miserable attempts to include HTML conversion in ClarisWorks (see TidBITS-295). I’m pleased to see Claris stepping into the Web authoring arena as a serious player.

Claris hasn’t yet decided what to charge for Claris Home Page, but they have decided to run a public beta, and beta versions of Home Page should be available for downloading from the Claris Web site by the end of this month. In an effort to avoid commenting extensively on new products before they enter final release, TidBITS probably won’t review Claris Home Page until it actually ships, much as we won’t review the pre-release PageMill 2.0, should Adobe decide to make it a public beta.

<http://www.claris.com/press/hotnews/rel- homepage.html>

<http://www.zdnet.com/macweek/mw_1018/news_ loma.html>