The Daydream Blog

There is one feature, in all of the apps that I use, that continues to impress me and makes a huge difference to my workflow. CSSEdit from MacRabbit does what it says on the tin – it edits CSS files, that define layout for modern web pages. For initiates, CSS seems like some arcane data file format pre-dating XML, but CSSEdit makes it easy to master.

Selecting a numerical field in CSSEdit such as Margin, Padding or Width, allows you to adjust the positioning of elements on your webpage. The live preview shows your changes immediately.

But the stand out feature is that if you hover your mouse over the selected field, you can use the mouse’s scroll wheel to adjust the value. This makes it phenomenally easy to fine tune the position of elements, to make them pixel perfect.

I primarily use Coda for my web development and although Coda has a built in CSS editor, it just doesn’t compare to CSSEdit. Which is perhaps why Panic, Coda’s creators, wanted to include CSSEdit within Coda, in the same way as they incorporate SubEthaEdit as the text editor in the app. It is a shame the two parties were not able to come to an agreement.

Here’s kudos to MacRabbit for great attention to detail, that makes a huge difference to users. Whilst Mac software developers need to remember the 80-20 rule to deliver, we still need to remember the other 20%. It should only been delayed to deliver the 80%, but still needs to be tackled to make our apps that extra bit special for our users.