Mar 23
Style Master 3.5 review
2004 at 06.50 am posted by Veerle Pieters
I’ve been using a demo version of Style Master for about 3 weeks now and I must say there are several cool features I like. First thing I like a lot about Style Master is the fact that your code mode is still visible while you add a property to your statement through the sliding menus. You see a live-update of your code while doing this.
Another useful feature is the Style Sheet Wizard and the Layout Wizard, especially if you put your first steps into the world of CSS, or if you just want to save time. This templates can be starting point and a learning resource.
Adding a statement can be done through the menu which will guide you to the correct style and the right code for that style. This is nice for beginners but once you know a bit of CSS like I you won’t use that feature that often. At least that is my experience, I actually don’t use it at all, but it is handy it’s there.
Another cool thing are the manuals that come with this program. It’s perfect to learn about CSS in an easy way. There are lots of good tips and tricks and you learn to create your first completely CSS based webpage navigation included.
I’m not using this a lot, but the option to see a live-preview in a separate window of your design while editing your CSS styles can be very handy. For example when you’re experimenting or if you’re trying to fix a bug. My trick is to use a 1 pixel border around my div id containers, then you see how you’re containers flow and it might help you to find the culprit. Having this live-preview is even better in such situation. On Mac OS X the preview window uses the Safari rendering engine.
What’s also cool is that you’re able to “style” your coding at will. This can be defined through the preferences. You can choose the font, size and color, and whether the properties should indent or not etc.
I have only one weirdness to post about this tool and I’m not 100% sure if this is a bug, but my left and right values for the margin and padding property are always switched. I seem to have this weirdness in both the Mac and Windows version. Not sure if anybody else uses Style Master and has the same issue?
You can download a 30 day trial here.
Next on my agenda is a post about CSS Edit that is recently been updated to version 1.6.1 with some new features.
5served
1
Margin and padding seem to behave correctly on my Windows XP box.
2
Can you save your code as UTF-8? I think Whitespace did a survey on who’s editing on what, no one mentioned this feature which a lot of the editors don’t have (I think , I’m an amateur…)
3
Oops, didn’t realize it only does CSS.
4
I would suggest trying
outline: 1px solid color;
-moz-outline: 1px solid color
as opposed to borders. borders are supposed to add to the box of an element, thus moving stuff around, whereas an outline is just drawn over the border area - not adding/subtracting from the box.
The -moz-outline is for mozilla to render the outlines….not sure why they didn’t just us outline. Hrm….
5
If you like StyleMaster, I would recommend you to try CSSEdit (http://www.macrabbit.com/cssedit/). I’ve tried all application on OS X and to me it’s the best.
It wasn’t out two years ago so I ended up making my own so it’s what I use, but if I ever get tired of my app, I’ll probably buy CSSEdit.
P.S. If you want to see my app, here’s a screen cap (
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