Review: TopStyle 3
Editor: TopStyle
Version: 3.12
Developer: Nick Bradbury, NewsGator
Website: http://newsgator.com
Platform/OS: Windows
WYSIWYG: No
License: Commercial
Price: $79.95 US
TopStyle is the newest editor from the creator of HomeSite, Nick Bradbury. Touted primarily as a tool for building standards compliant websites, TopStyle is meant mainly for those who work with (X)HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, although there is limited support for PHP.
Things I Like
- Easy navigation between documents by clicking an HTML class/ID attribute to navigate to the definition of that class/ID in an external style sheet, or clicking an anchor tag or CSS link to open the linked file for editing. You can even click on an
< img >tag to open the image file in your favourite image editor. - Style Sweeper to format your style sheets based on multiple rules (think HTML Tidy, but for Style Sheets).
- CSS Palette Editor, enabling you to quickly view and manipulate all colour values in a style sheet.
- Customizable user interface, toolbars, and menus.
- Multi-document editing, including draggable document tabs, allowing you to choose the order of open documents.
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
- Code syntax highlighting for PHP, (X)HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT.
- Code auto complete and code insight for (X)HTML and CSS, which make typing out code a bit faster.
- Built-in live preview, so you don’t have to open an external browser to test your pages.
- Clip (code) library, which allows you to create and save snippets of code you can reuse in multiple projects/documents.
- Thumbnail preview which displays a list of thumbnails in a specified directory and allows you to insert an image into a current document or edit the image in an external program.
- Built-in CSS reference and good built-in help.
- I haven’t run into any major bugs.
- TopStyle is less than a 5MB download, which is great if you’re on a dial-up connection.
- Pretty good price (though not as good as WeBuilder).
Gripes
- Bradbury and NewsGator seem more focused on RSS at the moment, spending most of their time on FeedDemon, which makes it feel like TopStyle is on the back burner. I think there’s been only one update (from 3.11 to 3.12) in the last year.
Wish List
- Global Find and Replace
- A multi-line Replace tool
- List and table creation buttons.
Overall
TopStyle 3.12 is the best CSS editor I’ve used, and it has a lot of great functionality. I’d like to see some more user-friendly features added to the (X)HTML side of things and better PHP support would be great, but that might be beyond TopStyle’s intended purpose. Overall, though, I’d certainly recommend TopStyle to anyone whose primary tasks are editing (X)HTML and CSS.
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I should also note that one of my favourite features is the automatic conversion of special characters into HTML entities when pasting into TopStyle. Add PHP support to this product, and Bradbury/Newsgator would probably win my heart forever.
Comment by Eric — August 10, 2006 @ 8:55 am