Gusto is a finely crafted web page development app. I searched for quite a while for a good web page editor and Gusto is one of the best. To write this, however, I am using the WordPress app which is splendid as well, but not every website is made in WordPress, and there are some things you need to code and use an FTP client for. In addition to Gusto for the iPad they have begun offering Gusto Mobile for the iPhone and iPod. This review is only for the iPad.
Features To begin with, each site gets set up as a project. Each project has it’s own thumbnail of the home page, so if you were trying to find a site quickly you could just view the thumbnails to find it. Projects have a number of different options including support for both FTP and SFTP. In the editor there are several different color themes you can use for editing code and almost every type of code syntax highlighting you would ever want.
Usability When developing pages, you don’t work directly on the site, you need to download the file, edit it, and then you can re-upload it back to the server. It takes a couple of steps, but it works perfectly. I prefer to work directly on the server, but this is actually the safer and more traditional method of editing remote files. It would be nice in future revisions to allow for direct editing on the server.
I have edited several sites using this program and it worked flawlessly. Once a page is done, it’s easy to just preview the page by clicking a button either locally or remotely. When a page is saved it can then be published to the server. There is not a native PHP compiler or a Dreamweaver WYSIWYG view, but I honestly was not expecting something like that with this type of editor, and that is what a computer IDE is for.
Conclusion As a developer I know that when you work on websites, multiple monitors, fast computers, and multiple browsers are the way to go, but if you find yourself outside of the office and need to make some last minute changes, Gusto gets the job done. Don’t throw out your computer yet, but for quick edits on the fly Gusto is awesome and app approved.
[xrr rating=5/5]