C-Mac's Favorite Mac Apps: CSSEdit

Over at TUAW, I listed Coda as one of my favorite applications, and indeed, it is a central part of my web development toolbox. When it comes to straight CSS editing, however, my favorite app is CSSEdit. CSSEdit by MacRabbit is the best CSS editor I have ever used. In fact, before CSSEdit, I was against the entire idea of a CSS editor -- isn't Notepad or TextEdit enough? Sure, but I like to save time and do things as quickly as possible, and this is where CSSEdit comes in.

My favorite feature of CSSEdit is the Live Preview and X-Ray inspector. Similar to Firebug (but with a much better interface that is less cluttered and much more accessible), CSSEdit shows changes you make to a stylesheet in real-time. There are also bookmarklets available for your browser that will open and edit the CSS stylesheet in CSSEdit with one-click. You can alternatively just load up a site and extract all stylesheets that the site uses and then manipulate them to your liking. It is a very handy way of seeing how certain stuff is done or isolating a problematic element.

For the user who is new to CSS, CSSEdit is nice because its dual visual/source code interface makes it easy to change elements of a stylesheet, like color or border type without having to know exactly what you are doing. For those of us that like to hand code everything, the automatic suggestions (based on what you frequently use) and the auto-insertion of brackets and appropriate spacing is a huge time saver.

To top it all off, CSSEdit has W3C Validation built-in. There are tons of great web development tools for the Mac, but when it comes to working with CSS, CSSEdit is my favorite, hands down!

Tags: css, cssedit, favorite-apps, mac