The Cattery

The Cattery

One Hour with Style Master

9 March 2005
Filed under Mac, Technology, Text, The Interweb

Every time there's been a significant upgrade to Style Master, I've dutifully downloaded it, opened it once to begin a free trial, and then failed to use it again before the trial period has expired. So I've never become at all familiar with it, or really had a chance to understand how I might use it. This is partly because I've become a bit of a hand-coding evangelist - it's just quicker, y'all - and partly because I haven't really heard enough about it to get excited.

Having played with the latest version for an hour or so this morning, I'm by no means an expert, but I've had such a mixture of positive and negative reactions to the thing that I thought I'd throw them into the ring.

First, the good: the interface is awesome. I'm getting a bit sick of the ole three-pane app, but this one's a cracker, spiced up with really nice, detailed, colourful toolbar icons, and good use of status-type bars to show browser compatibility and a visual representation of the cascade. I'm particularly impressed with the Statements sidebar, which is a list of classes and IDs from your stylesheet, styled as they're coded - for example, an h1 that is blue, bold and italicised will appear that way in the sidebar. One of the things that I'm always getting muddled up with is heading order - I tend to feel my way a bit, rather than setting out those styles before I start, and a visual guide to where I'm at would be incredibly helpful. Anything to prevent me from ending up with things like h3.medium, h3.black and h3.bigTopMargin - but no h4.

By far the best feature, though, is the ability to apply a stylesheet to a page that's already online. Anyone who's coded for Movable Type (or similar) knows the pain of tweaking styles once your basic layout's in place - your local site is filled with annoying MT tags, which are no substitute for real content when you're trying to format type, but it takes so damn long to upload and rebuild each time you make a change to the stylesheet that it all becomes a bit tedious. Style Master allows you to add Online Preview Documents and apply your local stylesheet to them - great for proper work but also, amusingly, for applying your own stylesheet to someone else's site. The X-Ray feature, which highlights the part of the page (online or offline) you're styling, is also excellent. ("Where am I using this h3.bigTopMargin again? Oh, I'm not. Delete.")

Now for the bad: integration with HTML editors is basically non-existent. Apart from being able to specify Style Master as the CSS editor from within GoLive or Dreamweaver, there's no way to make the program work with whatever you're using to code the HTML for a site. It's fine to have BBEdit open alongside Style Master, but the SM Design View pane isn't live-updating and there's no refresh key, so moving between the two is clunky. I know that when I'm designing a site, a lot of the early work is determining my layout DIVs, and SM makes HTML/CSS back-and-forth too fiddly for my liking. I actually don't see any reason why SM couldn't have a code-view pane, but I'm not a programmer, so perhaps I should shut up.

EDIT I made a small mistake: it's possible to access your HTML page in the editor of your choice (except if your choice is skEdit, which mine is). Still no live updating, but it's at least not as cumbersome as I'd originally thought. END EDIT

And finally, the ugly: It's full of bugs. Full of 'em. The first time I opened it, it crashed. The second time I opened it, I clicked on the Statements button, and it crashed. A little later I made the mistake of clicking on the 'Choose More Fonts' button in the Toolbar, and the fonts inspector it brought up refused to close or cancel, so I had to force quit. Working in the Design Preview pane is dicey, particularly when the design you're previewing is online. This suggests to me that SM needs another go around the beta-testing circuit, but perhaps I'm unlucky and have something on my drive that's causing big conflicts.

I really want to like this software. It's elegantly designed, and has some features which I would kill for. But the bads - in particular, the lack of integration with external text editors, which I think is unforgivable for a program intended for use by advanced coders as well as beginners - makes $60 hard to stomach at this point. And the bugs are just bugs: they need to be squashed. Bring on 4.1.

Views from the Floor

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