One of the hardest things about making the transition from Windows to OSX was letting TopStyle go. Quite simply it was about the only thing that made struggling with browser inconsistencies bearable, and made playing around with CSS a pleasure. I have never been happy with the OSX replacement I got for it – CSSEdit, whilst it handled previews nicely didn’t do keyword completion as well as TopStyle, nor did it have downright handy features like a colour chooser.
I tried WestCiv’s Style Master about six months ago when I was still Windows bound, but it didn’t work as well for me as TopStyle did. However the new version looks like it might have a killer feature which is encouraging me to give it another go. Style Master 4’s design pane allows you to click on a part of the preview view, and immediately edit the styles which affect that display. It also shows the elements position in the overall page structure which will make debugging cascading rules much easier. The fact that it works on both Windows and OSX is just a bonus. Anyway, with an impending heavy session working on the new site design due this holiday weekend, I’ll try and post a review soon.
magpiebrain 
5 Responses to “Style Master 4 – CSS Editing on OSX”
The beta builds of IntelliJ have excellent CSS support.
Believe me, simple support for CSS syntax highlighting, no-doubt useful, is not enough. IntelliJ will be aimed at the CSS done by developers, not web design proffesionals – web designers would rather pay a tenth of the price and get a dedicated tool. Oh, and as you’d guess from this website I’m _not_ a web design proffesional 🙂
As a heavy user of CSSEdit (it was the best for OS X when I bought it) I read your post and thought I’d try it. Here’s what I found (compared to CSSEdit)
+ Design pane preview and the block highlighting
+ Looks pretty
+ More properties
– Crashed a few times
– Slower
– Uses separate drawers for each property group: Ugh, too much clicking
I am torn… the preview and style highlighting is very nice but what I really wanted was to click on the preview pane and see the styles affecting the element to be highlighted.
I kind of have to agree – it crashed on me a lot. One huge benifit was being able to select elements in the preview pane and generate matching styles – for this site I was creating new CSS for an existing markup, and I found that very helpful.
same here mis topstyle a lot when moving to osx but gained a lot as well !! but the color pallette is something is truly mis this was/is verry usefull when developing themes to quickly change the color scheme…. maybe in leopard we can run topstyle natively 😉