Style Master

I went looking to make some CSS landing pages for several ads running and I realized something. In general, I know absolutely nothing about CSS or good layout using XHTML and CSS together.

I tried running through some W3C tutorials on CSS using Syn as my editor (primarily because I was too lazy to downl0ad the Visual Studio Web Express Edtion), but syn has some serious limitations (especially when it comes to line length).

Enter Style Master 4.6 by Western Civilization Software. The interface is very visual studio-like, but available for both Windows and Mac (YAY). It allows me to get very detailed down to multiple descendant elements and still see what it looks like. It is a paid application but at $60 is blows GoLive away period. Multiple browser support is built in and you can add browsers from a menu option. I really like seeing how my style sheets are going to display in Safari for Windows, primarily because Safari is very unforgiving, but if it shows up correctly there, it will be fine in the other browsers without much issue. Style Master did it without question.

There is a tutorial available with the application to instruct the basics of CSS/XHTML which I thought were pretty good for basics (explained what DTD were - that's not basic, that's theory, I like it). The tutprial showed you how to do it in code as well as how to use the style master application.

Over all I am mucho impressed. Style Master did receive 4.5 ratings from Macworld too, so I'm not the only one. Check it out, if you are wanting div based html with CSS driving the entire design, you will want this cheap but effective and intuitive application.

Macworld 08

So like every other mac fan, I am eagerly waiting for the bloggers to post the keynote tomorrow as well as new products from the vendors. Macworld San Fran always brings back memories of my first Macworld 1997. Of course I had never been to San Francisco before and was in a six car wreck on 101 after being in the state only 40 min. California certainly has a way of welcoming people....(jk). When I was there, the most promising things were Umax making clones, the BeOS running on Apple hardware, and the announcement of the first Radeon chipset. Wow have things changed since then.

I will post here what I think of new products and services as they come out of the expo this week. I am hoping that some of the announcements will relate to the iTunes store and the recent changes at Amazon.com. I really want Apple to stay competitive and on top of the download market, they seem to drive innovation here and I'm looking forward to the Big Four learning a thing or two. I would also love to see a revamp of the AppleTV, I think that Apple has something there, but it has kinda been disregarded. This is really the era of video on demand, and I really really want to digitize my movie collection to a device.

I will update as I learn, but I will probably start with the Bento announcement from Filemaker and a few others.