The Slow Death of TopStyle
I recently received an email (thanks, Charles) asking me to bring readers’ attention to the current plight of TopStyle, which hasn’t been updated in well over a year or two. As a result, the editor’s strong user base are concerned about TopStyle’s catatonic state (see here and here). Newsgator, on the other hand, seems to have little interest in the product, although they have posted an ad for a Delphi developer to continue work on the editor. I don’t know if any Delphi developers visit this site, but it would be great to get the word out in case some do. It would be a shame if the product didn’t continue to evolve, since it was and continues to be (despite its lack of updates) one of the best editors on the market.
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yeah definitely agree topstyle is great in the functionalities it gathers, but could use some face lifting. Best feature is the code formatter, where you can in one click optimize your code for reading or for bandwidth. For CSS, it’s the best editor out there.
Comment by Alexandre Plennevaux — February 26, 2007 @ 2:39 am
Thanks for the shout out Eric; it is indeed sad to see the truly pioneering TopStyle in such a moribund state. I really do hope Newsgator start putting a lot more effort into finding a developer.
I’d love to see TopStyle improve to be as extensible as jEdit and TextMate; I’d love to see a snippets and bundles system like TextMate’s and InType’s; the X-Ray features of MacRabbit’s CSSEdit and WestCiv’s StyleMaster; and the functionality of the Firebug Firefox extension built in.
But when it comes to tools one uses day-in-day-out, it’s not enough to bung a load of features together; the product needs to gel together and posses a polish that Nick Bradbury products always seem to posses. It’s the polish and balance of TopStyle that has prevented me from being permanently lured away by competitors, even thought TS is starting to feel distinctly long in the tooth now.
Comment by Charles — February 26, 2007 @ 7:41 am
One of my favourite features of TopStyle is the CSS Palette Editor, which I haven’t seen anywhere else. To be able to see actual colours along side their Hex equivalent can be a real time saver.
As I mentioned in my review, I’m also a big fan of how TopStyle automatically converts HTML entities when you paste text into the editor.
Comment by Eric — February 26, 2007 @ 9:20 pm
I started off on homesite and then moved onto Topstyle when HS was killed by Macromedia. TS really is a terrific prog and it’s really sad to see it get left by the wayside by another company. I’ve started running into problems from Topstyle being outdated and I’m going to have to move on – to what yet I don’t quite know (certainly not sh1tweaver).
Comment by Cooper — March 16, 2007 @ 8:33 am
Same as Eric said… I also found TopStyle’s CSS Palette Editor very useful.
Comment by FataL — March 28, 2007 @ 2:18 pm
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