Bootstrap Studio
Bootstrap Studio is a powerful desktop app for creating responsive websites using the Bootstrap framework.
It is a drag and drop editor reminiscent of Netscape Communicator but far more modern, written for Bootstrap and with excellent stability. You can use it to assemble responsive web pages. The app is built to make adoption of the hugely popular Bootstrap framework easier and exports clean HTML. It is not a product of the producers of the Bootstrap framework.
TL:DR It is very, very good!
Licensing and installation
Bootstrap Studio is $60 for a lifetime edition download which promises free upgrades forever. Could be too good to be true, but as I was looking for an editor to help me create better Bootstrap, to export to Joomla!, which supports Bootstrap 5 I thought it would be worth a look.
It has a tryout version which runs in Chrome, and promises support for macOS and Linux as well as Windows. The tryout shows you exactly how it works but only runs in Chrome which makes it a little odd that there is no ChromeOS support. No biggie though because the appimage for Linux works perfectly on my Chromebook. Just download it and chmod a+x filename to run it.
Bootstrap Studio is very up to date, and has frequent releases and already supports Bootstrap 5, and looks like it will fully support it as soon as it is released. The release notes are well written and frequent, and the forum is full of deep questions and thoughtful answers. These are marks of a good prodct I think so I paid the $60. Might as well.
After a couple of days use, I can say I am very glad I did. This is a quality piece of software, with a lot of power and great simplicity. It reminds me of Netscape Communicators web editor, and I mean that kindly because although buggy as hell that product had the same idea about easy HTML creation. That BootStrap Studio focuses entirely on Bootstrap should be obvious from its name, but I increasingly find myself hand coding Bootstrap flavoured HTML so anything that can improve my productivity is to be welcomed.
I have experienced no crashes or issues with the product. It has been simple to understand the key concepts, and it is a very pleasing product visually to me - delightful to use and no eye strain.
Bootstrap Studio allows me to paste HTML from my Joomla content into its editor, fix it up with better bootstrap components, save those out to HTML and import parts of that HTML into Joomla. It isnt designed as a Joomla editor but that workflow works perfectly well for me and I can continue to use other editors if I choose.
It is a delight to be able to have 'What you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) style editing for the web with all the built in components of Bootstrap and lovely templates available to use wherever in a page they are needed.
I have yet to use the Sites and Forms features that are part of the product. I don't really need them, but $60 for a clean Bootstrap editor is a price worth paying.
Templates
Bootstrap Studio coes with a fully developed set of templates which realy help to demonstrate the power not only of the framework itself but of the editor.
Once you select the template, and the bootstrap version you require, you simply edit it, in a very intuitive as using any of the available components, and adjusting the properties of each element as desired. It is really really easy to create beautiful content.
Real time preview
Not only can you adjust your design for different sized devices and their browsers, you can have multiple windows open and display your changes as you make them. This is a timesaver, and also improves your development process, making responsive designs front and centre of your thinking.
