PAD-Publisher

Being a program developer involves a lot of work, some of it tedious, but often essential, that needs to be done regardless. PAD-Publisher is an application that tries to save developers time, by making it easier and quicker to begin the publishing process for a PAD document for a particular program.

The design of PAD-Publisher is very basic, it doesn't cater to PAD creation in anyway and expects users to already have a finished or near finished PAD at hand. The lack of PAD editor is a bit of an issue, since a reason to edit the PAD might become apparent during the publishing process.

There is also the lack of help documentation of any kind, meaning that those who are unsure about how the publishing process works - especially new developers - will be lost in PAD-Publisher and what it provides. The application makes no effort to explain the stages that are necessary after PAD-Publisher and what else might be required of developers.

PAD-Publisher does provide a few options to adjust the PAD once its being loaded into the application, but how helpful they are exactly is up for debate. Users can select the language the PAD will be published under, however, not all will find this useful as it is often apparent.

Additional options included is the ability to clear the PAD history which developers might find useful, the only other option is customizing how many windows open when submitting a PAD per click. While there is more the program could do, such as making the preview window editable in case any mistakes are spotted.

While there is some merit to PAD-Publisher and the time saving feature it provides, there are some obvious ways it could do more. At the moment PAD-Publisher is more of more of a shortcut for a specific part of the publishing process, instead of a tool for the entire process. Considering the limited nature of PAD-Publisher, not all developers might want to spend time on it.