Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Style Master 3.5 Quick Review

Due
to rapid gain in pop­u­lar­ity of CSS-based design among web design­ers and devel­op­ers
more and more spe­cial­ized WYSIWYG tools are becom­ing avail­able to edit stylesheets.
Westciv’s Style­Mas­ter
3.5 is going to seduce both the novice user as well as the con­firmed stylesheet
expert. Style Mas­ter 3.5 has an intu­itive and com­plete inter­face — con­fig­ur­ing
the var­i­ous dia­log boxes to fit my per­sonal pref­er­ences was done in a mere 5
minutes.

Some inter­est­ing options include Sup­port Watcher to cross­check com­pat­i­bil­ity
of dif­fer­ent ele­ments and Live Pre­view to instantly view changes in an HTML
doc­u­ment. Per­son­ally I enjoyed using the State­ments List dia­log box together
with the Prop­er­ties dia­log box to quickly make adjust­ments to spe­cific rules,
while still being able to hand­code if required. How­ever it must be noted that
while Smart prop­erty edi­tors (con­text sen­si­tive edit­ing) is a very prac­ti­cal
tool, it will, unfor­tu­nately, con­sid­er­ably slow down the appli­ca­tion.*

Style Mas­ter 3.5 includes a num­ber of help­ful wiz­ards that gen­er­ate lay­out
ele­ments, nav­i­ga­tional ele­ments as well as link styles, among oth­ers. These wiz­ards
are great tools to learn CSS by exam­ple but also a valu­able time­saver for more
expe­ri­enced coders. Style Mas­ter 3.5 comes with com­pre­hen­si­ble help files, tuto­ri­als
and links to online resources, weblogs and books.

Priced at a more than rea­son­able $59.99 Style Mas­ter 3.5 is avail­able
for both Mac OSX and Win­dows. The appli­ca­tion instantly seduced me by it’s
ease-of-use, robust­ness and assort­ment of options and fea­tures. Give
it a try!

* Tested on Win­dows XP, P4 1.5 GHz and 512MB RAM

This item was posted by dhilhorst on Thursday, March 4th, 2004.

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