PostMaker

(copy-pasted from News update 17/9/08)

If you've ever been on a forum (which I suspect most of the visitors to this site have), and attempted to make an enormous post with all sorts of formatting (in my experience on Pokémon forums, setting up the first post for clans is a big job), you may have discovered that when you get to your fifth line of [url=http://photobucket.com/album/pictures/lololimages/big_picture_of_cheese.jpg], it all gets incredibly confusing. Add to that the fact that most forums have comparitively small edit boxes, and Notepad seems to enjoy adding random extra lines as soon as you put Word Wrap on (whilst Word complains furiously everytime it spots BBCode)... well, it's never been an easy job. Some forums log you out as inactive if you spend too long editting your post, too. Goody. So, that's where PostMaker comes in. It's essentially a simple text editor, but one that supports BBCode. There would be two windows on it, the Design window and the Preview window. The Design window lets you type in your post as you would on a forum, adding the BBCode as you go. Whilst you do this, the Preview window will constantly update, showing you exactly how your post will appear when you hit submit (images from websites would probably not show, though there would probably be some kind of image sample to show you where they are in your post). Now, when it gets complicated, you could start editting within the preview window instead. Don't worry about finding the start and end of a complicated URL code, just find the URL in the preview, select it, and hit delete (or right-click > Remove Link to retain the text if it's a labelled link). Same would go for images too. And like the Preview window's constant updates, whilst your doing this, the Design window will find and change all your edits to the Preview window. Posts would be able to be saved in simple txt format (the Design data would be saved, not the Preview one. That'll just be regenerated as soon as the program starts again), making it easy to edit your post later within some other software if needs be.
Of course, many forums have many different bits of BBCode, some don't use BBCode at all, but instead a different format. PostMaker would be compatible with BBCode and UBBCode (Clickteam forum's code), and all others that work in the same way ( [b] [/b] for bold, for eg). It would come with most basic functions, and would probably be updated with more should the need arise. I think I have some idea on how to make this (MMF2 users: probably using the String Parser Object?), so maybe sometime I'll work on it.