Now that I’m working on TopStyle again, I’m wondering what I can do to make it less annoying.
Every piece of software has annoyances – seemingly minor things that over time really get on your nerves, like:
- Constant dialog boxes asking you to confirm something you’ve confirmed 100 times before
- Settings that change behind your back
- Tasks which require too many keystrokes or mouse clicks
- Features which take a while to complete yet give no visual indicator telling you when they’ll be done
So in addition to adding the usual bug fixes and new features to the next version of TopStyle, I’d also like to remove the things that annoy you. If there’s something in TopStyle that makes you grind your teeth, please let me know by posting a comment here.
Will you fix the vista problem in 3.5? After using “find” (for example) in the window that when activated Topstyle doesn’t give the focus to the original textbox. So after a find one has to click the current open document to bring focus to the document. This also breaks third party programs like Direct Access (from nagarsoft) from working with Topstyle.
one tiny but persistent annoyance. when specifying a background position, the statement auto-closes after just one value.
For example, I want to write:
#x{ background-position: top right;}
after background position: I get an autocomplete hint, and after selecting “top” ; is automatically added, and I have to go back and input the other value manually
another one is that the find function does not have the option to continue searching from the top. once you’ve reached the end of the doc, you have to manually (re)select (x) start from top.
Thanks Nick
To the person who said topstyle on the mac: ARE YOU CRAZY!?!
For just CSS there’s the beautiful CSSEdit and for the lean mean swiss army knife of web tools there’s Coda.
Really Coda rocks! Unfortunately, I’m forced to use a PC here at work. Topstyle is the only thing that comes close. It’s great, but frankly it’s interface is still clunky in comparison to Coda. The whole view bar and sites functions are non-intuitive — the weird multi-layered sideways view nav that changes everything and takes over the whole screen is really confusing.
I could probably get used to the view bar, but frankly it rubs my UI designer soul the wrong way and I hide the view bar and don’t use it much for this reason. There’s some good functionality in there, but I think the UI needs to be rethought. Maybe in the very least the tabs for the files you are working on should stay visible? It’s startling to see them all disappear (“Ah! my work where did it go!”).
After that, I guess the biggest thing I miss in Topstyle is the lack of FTP functionality. Due to ASP includes, I need to FTP to the Dev server to see my pages and having to jump to another app all the time to ftp slows my flow dramatically.
Also as someone else mentioned being able to collapse code would be great.
It would be great if TopStyle handled included stylesheets a little better. EG if the “Selectors” pane could (optionally) show all selectors for the current CSS AND all the included CSS files. Maybe same for the palette editor.
What would be even better is if it would work when looking at an HTML file.
Not an annoyance as such but it does get a little frustrating working with multiple stylesheets sometimes.
Good news that TopStyle is getting some new developments though!
An idea that I’ve got at coding-delirium around midnight:
Although there’s a search function, it were nice sometimes, if there is the possiblity to grey out all code and have only content (text, alt-attributes, meta keywords, meta description, title-attribute contents) in dark colors (via Color Coding, perhaps via a special button).
So you could concentrate only on content, if you need to.
Volker E.
For me it’s all about the folder tree / files view. That’s the feature I miss the most in all other editors. It’s instant and direct access to all my old code and so it’s fast copy/paste into a recent project file.
What annoys me about TopStyle is the way the Save (a new file)/Save As dialog in respect to the selected folder in the tree is managed. This has been (allmost) perfectly solved in Homesite, whereas TopStyle allways offers to save in the directory where I saved the last file into (regardless of the selected folder).
Please correct me, if I missed the one and only option to change this behavior.
And UTF support will be crucial for me within the next months, just can’t ignore it anymore :-(
Thanks for the brilliant work Nick – I use Homesite/TopStyle Pro for more then ten years now and I still love it …
I have been using HomeSite and now TopStyle Pro for about 8 years now.
Since the long delay in updates, I recently started using WeBuilder 2007 which seemed to have all the features I was looking for. I quickly realized how sluggish and buggy it is compared to Top Style Pro. It made me really appreciate the quality of your software.
Here is my list of features I would love to see in a future TopStyle release:
Built in FTP support to quickly publish current page or entire site, ability to directly modify files on the webserver.
Special character support like HomeSite.
Better snippet manager like HomeSite.
I really like having common HTML tags at my fingertips. I like how HomeSite and WeBuilder 2007 implement this.
I have a ton more features I would like to see, but I will keep it short for now.
I am very happy to see you working on Top Style again! Thanks Nick.
Would be nice if you could extend it like you could with homesite using custom buttons and activescript. Some useful shortcuts are missing:
Double click to highlight current tag (why triple click?)
Ctrl+Shift+DblClick – Highlight the start and end tag and its contents
Repeat last tag keyboard shortcut
Oh yes, UTF-8 support will be a great joy. I don’t want to use Aptana or Dreamweaver!