PageSpinner

» see optima-system.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

PageSpinner was the compromise everyone wanted in 1996. One side of the Mac market had BBEdit, which was a text editor that assumed you already knew HTML. The other had Adobe PageMill, which assumed you did not want to. PageSpinner sat between them: a text editor that showed you the tags, with an assistant panel that would write them for you and a preview that showed what you had done.

It came out of Optima System in Sweden, which was one person, Jerry Åman. The first release ran on System 7 and wanted 1800K of application memory, and it was shareware at twenty five dollars, which is to say it worked whether you paid or not and the author hoped you would. Enough people did that the thing kept being developed for over a decade, through the Carbon rewrite and onto Mac OS X. By 1998 it had spread far enough to sit in NASAlib, the shareware collection the agency kept for its own people.

Its real moment arrived when PageMill died. Adobe had bought the easy option and then abandoned it, and the Mac web authors who had been using it needed somewhere to land that did not cost several hundred dollars. Macworld called it the only affordable option left once PageMill was gone, and said it offered features not found in programs several times the price while still showing a few rough shareware edges.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the honest price ~

The twenty five dollars went up to twenty nine ninety five and stayed at that price until the end. Version 4.5, out on 15 June 2003, added Safari support and syntax coloring for PHP and CSS, plus the ability to edit local files served by a running web server. Version 5.1 landed on 19 September 2008 for Leopard, still thirty dollars, and the registration also unlocked two other Optima programs. A Macworld UK reviewer in 2010 called the interface dated and the price high for what you got, while liking how it handled multiple sites and how it worked with the Apache server already sitting inside OS X.

~ the other spinners ~

Optima System made a small family. MapSpinner drew HTML image maps and CamSpinner handled webcams. There was also XSpinner, a desktop personalization tool for Leopard. None of them mattered the way PageSpinner did, but they tell you what kind of shop this was: one person shipping small Mac utilities under the same suffix, out of Sweden, for twenty years.

~ going dark ~

There is no closing announcement to quote, because there was not one. The site's own copyright line says 2012, which is the last year anybody touched it. The pages kept being served exactly as they were, unchanged, with the free trial links still on the front page, for another six years.

The Internet Archive last pulled a working copy of optima-system.com on 18 October 2018. By 16 September 2019 the address answered 404, and the domain later passed to an unrelated French company that uses it today. One detail from those last captures stays with me. The page carries a generator tag reading Optima PageSpinner for MacOS. The site advertising the editor was written in the editor, and that was still true on the day the server stopped answering.

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