11.10.2005

CSSVista Review

Grade: Incomplete



I got CSSVista installed yesterday, here at work we already had copies of the Windows Installer 3.0 and the .Net Framework 2.0.

CSSVista delivers just what it offers:

"edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously."


This is very cool and could be extremely helpful in some cases. However, if it's not in that sentence, it's not in the software. The File menu has one option: Exit. The View menu has one toggle: Split View. The Tools menu, the most robust of the three contains these options: Edit CSS, Automatic CSS Refreshing (in other words, Live! Refreshing of the output).

There is no option to Save your work without copying and pasting it to your favorite editor. There is no context menu, no right-click copy.

I'm an avid reader of 37Signal's blog Signal v. Noise and understand less.

I will be watching CSSVista, because as Nathan Pitman says "I think this liitle application has some great potential!".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think it's a little unfair to judge the software unfavourably due to the number of items on the menus.

We are thinking of adding more features, such as saving via FTP, and things such as "highlight block level elements", but the idea is that we're getting it out there *now*, getting feedback from actual users, and doing lots of iterations.

It's version 0.1 - we're not hiding the fact that it's a first draft.

Personally I think its status is better described as "promising" rather than "incomplete" :-)