The Comfy Chair of PAD File Editors

Features

Padded was a feature-filled but user-friendly PAD file editor. PAD is an initiative of the Association of Software Professionals (ASP).

Padded helped you build publicity and increase downloads of your software, by creating PAD files that software distribution sites can load into their product databases.

• Software descriptions for all PAD spec languages. Unicode and UTF-8 supported.
• 18 PAD extensions: Affiliates, Article, ASP, Delphi, ESC, MSN, Newsfeed, OISV, Online Shops, PAD Ring, PADmap, Press Release, RoboSoft, RSS Feed, Runtime, Simtel, TPA and ZDNet.
• Import/export using PADGen Company Info (CML), PADGen Program Info (PML) files and PAD file components.
• Tooltip help for each field and content length conformance in text fields.
• Templates to automatically handle CML/PML/PAD file component imports when starting a new file.
• Digital signing of your PAD files, via integration with third party tools.
• PAD file transfer: send your PAD file to and from your web site.
• A "best effort" approach to loading broken PAD files.

Also:

• Windows version runs on a wide range of other operating systems (including FreeBSD, PC-BSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Linux and BeOS) using Wine; and natively on ReactOS.
• Comprehensive onboard and online documentation.
  
• Workflow is the same in Windows, Mac OS X and Linux/X11 versions.
• Platform appropriate look and feel.

Now Retired Software

The PAD 4.0 specification's licensing led to AppVisor.com becoming the exclusive licensee to provide an online PAD editor and repository, ending the role of third party utilities like Padded.

While it was a bit disappointing at the time, the logic of centralising PAD to a single location, where standards conformance could be guaranteed, is hard to argue against. In the end, I was proud to have brought PAD file editing to so many platforms, at a time when the ASP's recommended software (PADGen and PADManager) remained Windows-only.