Lightly Toasted

Thanks to Maxine Sherrin and John Allsopp for the hard work they put in towards keeping Style Master on the bleeding edge. Their company Westciv has very recently released version 4.5.1 now featuring a large number of new features, and improvements to several existing features. Here is a quick run down… And if you have not tried Style Master before, I suggest you give it a whirl. And while you are at it, check out Westciv’s online courses here.

Working with Statements

Search field

At the top of the statements panel, you’ll now find a standard rounded “search field” like you’d find in Safari, Mail, and many other apps. Type in here, and Style Master will show you either all of the statements which have a selector matching the text you’ve entered, or all of the statements which contain the text you’ve entered. A popup menu lets you choose the style of searching you want. This is a deceptively simple, yet really powerful way of taming complex style sheets.

You can for instance, almost instantly find all of the statements with a particular property, or value, for example all of the elements with a background color of #fcf, or which have a line-height set.

Style Sheet Sorting

Until now, the statement list only showed the statements in a style sheet in the order they appear in the CSS. Useful, but limited. Version 4.5 introduces two new ways of ordering your statements.

1. By Type

   When you choose this option, Style Master lists all of the statements in your style sheet grouped by type, and in a hierarchical fashion. So you can see all your link, class, id, group and other selectors all grouped logically, yet still click any selector to jump to it in your style sheet. But if you think this is useful, wait ’til you start using “smart sections”

2. Smart Sections

   Many of us organize our style sheets using comments to create different “sections”.

   Now with version 4.5, Style Master can recognize these sections, and display your statements in a collapsible hierarchical fashion in the statement list. You can expand and contract these sections simply by clicking a disclosure triangle.

   It doesn’t matter what format of comment you use for creating your style sheet sections, just tell Style Master what it is once, and it will recognize them for all your style sheets. No need to change your CSS one bit.

3. Only Matching Statements

   This shows only those statements which match the currently selected element in the design pane. A great way of focussing on why a particular element has the style it does.

Code Editing

Snippets

We often find ourselves reusing similar CSS code over and over again. Font sets, colors, selectors, and even whole chunks of code. With Style Master 4.5, we’ve implemented a way for you to quickly and easily access your “snippets” and reuse them in different style sheet, any time. The new snippets pane lets you drag pieces of code to be stored, and then easily insert them in the current style sheet. It’s like an infinite clipboard that never forgets.

Find All

We’ve extended the Find capabilities of Style Master with version 4.5

You can now find all of the instances of your search string, and they are returned in a list in the find window. Clicking an entry selects it in the style sheet.

Bugs

Style Master’s syntax coloring has always been unique in coloring syntax mistakes. It can even distinguish between mistakes with properties (for example “text-algn”) and values (#45566). But we now make it easier still to fix any bugs in your CSS with the built in W3C validator. When you are connected to the net you can check your CSS from Style Master with the W3C’s validator, and then interactively fix any problem.
Genuine Quality assurance for your code.

When style sheets get complex, and are used for some time, parts of them are no longer used. But which parts, its almost impossible to really tell. Not any more. Style Master can now find unused statements in single pages or whole sites. A unique debugging feature.

Designing

Computed Style

The way an element finally appears in a web page in your browser can be a complex interaction of your CSS, default browser CSS, users preferences, and more. What the element looks like is technically termed it’s “computed style”. In Style Master you can now click any element in the design pane, and show it’s computed style for every single CSS property. This can be very useful in debugging and understanding your style sheets in action.

Similarly, you can see the HTML for any element that is being styled - useful when you want to quickly check its properties - no need to open your page up in an HTML editor and find the code.

Blogging

Do you have a blog? Work with blogs and bloggers? Increasingly developers are sing blogging tools like Wordpress as lightweight content management systems. Blogs are quick and easy to set up, but often tricky to customize and style uniquely. Creating blog templates can be hard. What PHP do you include? What structure should me HTML take.

Style Master introduces a new Wizard for setting up 6Apart blogs (for 6Aparts new unifiedTypePad, MovableType and LiveJournal blog format, WordPress and Blogger. We’ll be adding more of these soon, for systems like TextPattern, and CMS tools like ModX and Drupal.

New Templates

We’ve added more templates, from renowned designer Andreas Viklund, including a template specially designed for Style Master. These are beautiful, sweetly coded templates. See why hundreds of thousands of people use Andreas’s Templates.

Editors

Style Master’s editors have always set it apart, providing powerful easy to use tools for creating valid CSS every time. How could we improve on that?

All properties Editor

Style Master 4.5 features a new editor, which presents you with all the CSS properties in a single editable list. But It still makes it easy for you to edit your CSS properties. This is a feature power users are going to love.

Faster editor changes

If you are a Mac OS X user, you know how irritating it has been to change editors in Style Master, only to have the current drawer slide closed and a new one open? Sure it looks cool - the first time. We agree, so we got rid of all those different drawers - there is now a single editor window, and changing between editors is now lightning fast.

FTP

Most style sheets end up on an ftp site for serving to the web. Until now, you’ve had to use a separate application to upload your finished CSS. Now, with Style Master, you can both upload style sheets to an ftp server, and even edit your CSS live on a server via ftp (some caution required - remember that any changes will go straight to your website - but perfect for minor changes, or for rapid uploading without the fuss of changing to your ftp app, connecting to your server, dropping your style sheet into it, and OKing the changes.)