HTML Editor Reviews | Reviews and Discussion of (X)HTML Coding Tools

Two New CSS Framework Tools

Boks is an Adobe Air application that provides a user interface for working with the Blueprint CSS framework. Boks handles the grid and baseline settings and then exports the CSS and HTML files.

For the 960.gs framework, which is what I’ve been trying out for the last little while, there’s a new jQuery plug-in called 960.gs grid overlay that does as the name implies — it overlays a semi-transparent 960 grid over your layout as you develop your site. According to the developer, there is also a bookmarklet in the works.

E Text Editor Goes Open Source

As of April 3, E Text Editor has gone open source as part of developer Alexander Stigsen’s transformation of his company into an Open Company. The source for E has been released on GitHub.

What does this mean for the future of the editor? The developer explained:

What the release means is that you can never risk ending up with a product that is totally abandoned, that many more eyes will be there to find and remove bugs, that companies and individuals can themselves add features only they need for inhouse use and that the community can help speed up the development of e and hopefully free me up to work on the more innovative features (of which there are many in the planning stages).

This move to open source also means that a Linux version of E will be possible once a Linux version of the ecore library is released. To give back to the community, Stigsen has said that the Linux version of E will be free.

For more information, check out the developer posts about releasing the source and becoming an Open Company.

Review: Espresso 1.0

MacRabbit’s newly released Espresso has clearly been positioned as a rival to Panic’s Coda (review), with each striving for one-window web development supremacy on the Mac. What’s interesting about comparing these two apps, however, is their different approaches to what’s essentially the same basic functionality. Each program is defined by its heritage: Coda shares a lot of its DNA with Transmit, featuring powerful FTP and project management tools. The weakest part of Coda is the text editor. Espresso, on the other hand, is CSSEdit’s much more multi-faceted younger sibling and it has learned many of CSSEdit’s tricks, plus a slew of new ones. As a result, Espresso’s strongest feature is the text editor.

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