ANN: TopStyle 3.5 Final Release

Published on by Nick Bradbury

At long last, the final release of TopStyle 3.5 is now available. My thanks go out to everyone who helped during the lengthy beta cycle – I hope you enjoy the new version!

As you can see from the release notes, version 3.5 isn’t a minor upgrade – it offers a ton of new features, improvements and fixes. It could easily have been called TopStyle 4.0, but I know customers have been waiting a long time for a new TopStyle, so we’ve named it v3.5 and made it a free upgrade from v3.0.

To get it, just stop by the TopStyle Registered Download page, then enter the serial number you received if you purchased TopStyle through NewsGator. If you purchased through another online store (such as RegNow), enter the email address you used when you placed your order. Note that there’s no need to uninstall the previous 3.x version before upgrading – just install v3.5 directly on top of it.

Top five new features in TopStyle 3.5:

  1. Box Spy – exposes an HTML tag’s margins, padding and content box as you mouse over it in the preview
  2. Live Preview – apply the current style sheet to an external URL
  3. Replace in Files – as requested by countless former HomeSite users who loved its "Extended Replace" feature
  4. New style definitions for Firefox 2, IE7, Safari 2 and Opera 9
  5. PNG images are now supported by the thumbnail viewer

Top five improvements in TopStyle 3.5:

  1. Faster performance throughout
  2. Insight now displays a list of HTML entities when & key is pressed
  3. Hitting TAB when text is selected now indents the selection (I know this seems like a minor improvement, but enough people asked for this that I figured it deserved to be included here)
  4. Support for printing in color
  5. Thumbnail viewer is now embedded in the file explorer for easier access

Top five fixes in TopStyle 3.5:

  1. Site reports and style insight now correctly support multiple class names (ex: <div class="class1 class2">)
  2. Style sweeper now does a much better job preserving CSS comments
  3. Thumbnail viewer now always shows the correct image dimensions regardless of the system font size
  4. W3C HTML Validator no longer fails due to invalid content-type
  5. A myriad of fixes to make TopStyle Vista-compatible

If you have any questions or comments about the new TopStyle, please stop by our support forums and we’ll follow up with you ASAP.

22 thoughts on “ANN: TopStyle 3.5 Final Release”

  2. Thanks Nick, will be installed as soon as I’ve posted this thank you.
    Just one slight problem: Download didn’t work in Firefox for me, had to start IE for it. Don’t know if others have the same problem.

  4. Congrats Nick on the release! You don’t know how much Extended Find/Replace saved me! Where do I post v4.0 feature requests :) Anyway, thanks again!

  5. That’s hot! Kudos for doing that work yourself finally, after the stall while searching for a new developer. Now when can I get my grubby hands on that FeedDemon 2.6 beta? ;-)

  6. I’ve just tried the new Top Syle 3.5 Beta version and I’m very excited for all the new features… But I’ve just ordered a Mac: I’m switching from Win.
    I haven’t found it in the forums…
    Will you make a version of Top Style for Mac users too? I hope so much…
    Thanks for all your great work…

  7. Excellent!
    Like many, I feared for the development of TopStyle, so this is a very, very welcome relase.

  8. Excellent news :)
    It might be worth having the update checker 3.12 redirect through to that page too, as the current landing page says that 3.12 is still the latest version.

  10. Nick,
    I’m still using HomeSite 5.5 and TopStyle Lite. I have a new web project. What do you recommend for a replacement to HS5.5 to use with TopStyle 3.5?

  11. @Paul, that’s hard for me to say. FWIW, I’m using TopStyle Pro as a replacement for HomeSite, since it’s an HTML editor as well as a CSS editor.
    If that doesn’t suit your needs, perhaps someone else can make a few recommendations?

  12. Nice to hear that! Want to buy it ASAP.
    I want to khow one thing: is it fixed when StyleSweeper broke right order (LoVeHAte) of pseudoclasses? Because it did it in alphabetic order, and it was weird. :-(

  13. great product! unfortunately still not supporting utf-8. this is the reason for switching to other products. :-(

  14. Hello Nick,
    I really love the new TopStyle, and have been following the beta’s for a while.
    but please add an link to this page or the ‘http://www.newsgator.com/download/secureDownload.aspx?topstyle=1’ page on the ‘http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/readme/’ because I had a hard time finding the correct download page!
    But the best part of the final product is the free upgrade for 3.x customers ;-). Thanks a lot and keep up the good work

  15. @warmrobot: yes, the style sweeper in v3.5 puts pseudo-classes in the correct order (:link, :visited, :hover, :active).
    @Pettrie: thanks for the reminder – I’ve justed added a link to the download page.

  16. Thanks for the free upgrade Nick, a really nice gesture. Even after switching to Mac I couldn’t say goodbye to Topstyle so now it runs in Parrallels and I still create my sites with it!

  18. Hi Nick
    Thanks for the free upgrade and the great work, I use TopStyle Pro as xhtml, css, asp classic and php editor. But I really miss;
    Tag inspector within a PHP/ASP tag.
    PHP/ASP colorcoding within xhtml tag.
    Magnus

  19. Great update. Great program.
    Great programming. On every level a homerun.
    We who’d been despondent about TopStyle’s
    languishment are now ecstatic Re: the
    rejuvenation.
    Excelsior !
    — stan

  21. please let me know if you ever release this for the MAC – – I use Top Style on my PC and love it –tried BBEDit and CSS edit they don’t compare to Top Style in my book!! Love your problem–just hoping you’ll offer a MAC version :)

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