Announcing: CSSVista 0.15
Download
CSSVista 0.15 (.msi, 8.9MB)
Please uninstall any older versions of CSSVista before installing 0.15.
Features
- Editing of CSS and inline styles, with a live preview in both Internet Explorer and Firefox at the same time.
- Element outlining in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
- Powerful CSS Editor, including:
- Syntax highlighting.
- Auto complete.
- Dual-pane editing (view two seperate places in the same css-file at once).
- Find (and Replace) with RegEx support.
- Option to resize the window to typical sizes.
- Option to disable images and/or css.
- Firefox now supports various plugins such as Flash and QuickTime.
- Lots and lots of bug fixes.
Auto file-version savingTesting has uncovered a lot of problems with this so I'm removing it for now.- Auto-updates - all updates happen silently in the background.
Requirements
Windows XP, 2003 or Vista
MS .net Framework 2.0 (if you're using Vista you don't need this - if you're using XP or 2003 you probably already have it installed - if you don't - download and install it here).
The version of Internet Explorer you have installed determines which version CSSVista will use.
Troubleshooting
If CSSVista seems to be running slowly, try unchecking "Automatic CSS Refreshing" found under the tools menu. You'll need to press Ctrl+S from now on to update the browsers.
If you receive an error about IE throwing an 'out of memory' error, please post the url you were using at the time, or email it to me at: matt@mattbrindley.com if you prefer.
If your outgoing firewall blocks CSSVista, approve it and then restart CSSVista.
Some firewalls (including Windows Firewall) will continue to deny CSSVista access because of the way it first connects - restarting CSSVista will fix this problem.
What took so long?
First of all, an apology.
Sorry for the problems CSSVista 0.1 had, and sorry it's taken so long to get a fix out.
I'm not going to dwell on this, but I would like to explain why it took me so long to get an update out.
Not long after launching CSSVista 0.1 we saw an opportunity with SiteVista's email testing service and decided to focus on that, most of my time was spent developing email testing and CSSVista unfortunately took a back seat.
A few weeks ago I decided to just do everything I could to get a new build out. I started stripping out incomplete features and focusing completely on getting a stable, deployable build ready.
I really, really hope you'll find the tool useful.
It's also really important to mention that this may be the last major-version release of CSSVista. It will still be developed, but under different names (don't worry, we'll still be offering a free version of something very similar) and will not be out for a while. We have some fantastic and very exciting ideas for this application.
Post any bugs you find here and let me know what you think of it!
Comments
April 22, 2007 7:23 PM
Looking forward to trying this newer version - if it's released under a new name, will it still be a free tool?
April 22, 2007 7:57 PM
Hi Jeff,
Good question, yes, we plan to offer at least the functionality of CSSVista in another application for free. I've updated the post to make it a bit clearer.
April 30, 2007 7:40 PM
UX: I use hard tabs in my CSS, although CSSVista does a good job at guessing line spacing for any lines AFTER spacing has been used, if I insert a newline after a line that has no whitespace at the beginning, and then use tab...I instead get the first value for the auto-suggestion.
P.S. - The "Preview" option for the comments seems to be a bit...off.
Still getting some slight but noticeable differences in rendered values in CSSVista and actual values in each browser. Although I don't think this is the fault of CSSVista, it does prevent me from using this almost explicitly until I'm nearly ready to go live.
May 28, 2007 8:26 PM
What is the connection between Vista and CSS? Is the fancy name a way to exploit the hype about Vista? You could do UbuntuCSS in mono (Like .NET for Linux).
May 28, 2007 9:18 PM
@What is Vista?:
It might have been worth doing some research before posting that.
1. CSSVista is produced by SiteVista - a company name that existed long before Microsoft decided to name longhorn "Vista". SiteVista had (and still does have) a very large customer base before MS announced Vista and it wasn't feasible to change our name.
2. A mono port is of no use as MSHTML is not available off of the Windows platform. Also, mono is not '.net for Linux' - it's a version of the CLR and framework available on Windows, Linux, OS X and numerous other platforms.
Thanks for the feedback anyway.
@Brendon:
Thanks :) I've fixed the comment preview problem - The problem with rendering lies with the version of the Gecko I'm using - I'm hoping to post much more about this later this year.
Re: the tabs, yes, I agree 100% - I need to get that changed :)
August 21, 2007 3:31 AM
Are you looking into making CSSVista show what it would look like in IE6 as well as in IE7 if the user has the opposite installed, or is this even possible?
September 9, 2007 6:07 PM
Wow! This is great.
As Adam mentioned, I also really hope you can add a feature to show how a page would look in IE6 and 7.
September 21, 2007 12:17 PM
How about a menu entry called help?
I get an error when i hit the EditCSS Button.
At least a hit to where i could get help or something...
June 18, 2008 5:08 PM
For some reason I am unable to run this new version.
when I start up, I get a message:
CSSVista has encountered a problem: "The specified module could not be found.(Exception from HRESULT: 0x8007007E)" and needs to close.
any clues what might be happening?