The title says it all. We’re looking more seriously into adding validation support for CSS3 properties. We need to track the varying popularity of each property. Comments on this post have been purposely disabled, because we like you to respond on our forum.

Today we released a new version of Stylizer. This is mostly a maintenance release, mostly fixing some annoying bugs. Below is the changelog:

The most significant thing we added is: The “Make Rule” button in the breadcrumb becomes “Add To Rule” while editing a rule, making it easy to append multiple selectors, as requested in this thread on our forum: http://forum.skybound.ca/topic.php?id=363

Here are a list of the bugs fixed:

- Disabling a property with a “Not IE6″ or “Not IE5″ browser hack applied would create a CSS file with errors when saved
- Bullseye would include certain rules which did not actually match a target element
- HTTP locations can now be loaded in Firefox even when offline (i.e. on a local development server), reported in this thread: http://forum.skybound.ca/topic.php?id=361
- The style sheet for the last 2 tutorial pages was not loading
- In some situations, the save progress dialog would not close automatically after saving was complete
- Fixed window title bar repainting problems when minimizing and restoring Stylizer

Although this update contains only bug fixes, the version number has been updated to 4.3 in order to override an incorrect version number applied to the previous automatic update.

Some time ago we made a blog post about how we were forced to stop development progress on Stylizer for Mac, because of insurmountable development challenges. Well, the release of Mono Tools for Visual Studio has changed that. We now have a great way to develop Stylizer in Visual Studio, (the best software development IDE in the world), and remotely debug our code on a Linux box, and (shortly) a Mac. This means that we’re going to have both a Mac and Linux version of Stylizer in the somewhat-near future.

So, we’re currently in the process of moving Stylizer’s dialogs over to the cross-platform layer. This means that the dialogs in future versions of Stylizer are going have the same look of the main application window, that everyone loves.

We don’t have a release date pegged, but I can say that the speed of cross-platform development with these new tools is startlingly quicker than before. Stay tuned!

As you may have noticed, we send out an update to Stylizer on October 2nd. This release brings a variety of bug fixes, as well as a much needed feature: Firefox 3.5 support.

It seems that some people aren’t able to update via the automatic update feature built into Stylizer. If this is you, simply re-downloading and installing will fix the problem.

We had previously announced that a Mac version of Stylizer was going to ship within a short period of time.

While we still plan to deliver on that promise, it’s going to happen a lot later than we had originally planned.
I know this will be bad news for a lot of people, but we have no choice, as we’ve run into a lot of unforeseen
technical problems. The good news is that we’ve planned to improve the user experience when using Stylizer
inside a virtual machine.

We have to keep the same code base between Windows and Mac. Stylizer is written in C#, and although Mono (open-source, cross-platform .NET implementation) runs fairly well on the Mac, there are some major roadblocks in our way. First of all, there is no real IDE for writing and debugging C# software on the Mac. We were actually developing the Mac version with Visual Studio on Windows, then copying the file through the network to the Mac, and running it with a Terminal window open for debugging. It was pretty crude. And to add to that, Mac software development technology is light years behind Windows and .NET, severely lacking in automation, documentation, and standardization. Apple really needs to pick up their game here. Developing cross-platform software (or any software) on their platform is so slow, if were to continue this process, it would be a roughly 18 months before we had a shippable product.

There is a debugger for Mono coming to the Mac, and once it’s complete, and once we can find a Mac expert to hire, we’ll return to building the Mac version. Until then, we just aren’t being productive working on it. We really have two options.

We’ve Shifted Gears

In the meantime we’ve shifted gears. We’re starting serious R&D on a second product that’s been code named ‘The Launch’. The Launch is something we’ve been toying with for a few years, and it will be Skybound’s second product. Although I can’t give really any details yet, it’s a product that you will be able to plug into Stylizer, or use on it’s own. We believe it will have more of an impact on your development than all of Stylizer. No, it’s not an HTML editor. Or a JavaScript/PHP/C# IDE. It’s a kind of design tool that doesn’t exist yet in the industry. Unfortunately, we’ll need to keep the specifics of this product confidential until it’s released.

Skybound has been accepted into the “Accelerator Center” in Waterloo, Ontario. It’s a government-funded building occupied by startup technology companies. Residents have access to scalable office space, free consultation, and most importantly, connections with anybody in the industry. It’s located in the Research and Innovation park. Literally across the street is the Institute for Quantum Computing, the RIM headquarters, the University of Waterloo (one of the top software engineering schools in the world), Google, OpenText and Sybase.

Waterloo is a unique community that is relatively low on population but busting at the seams with technology, innovation, and overall intelligent people. The population is only around 120,000, but it is home to over 400 technology companies. There could not be a better location for Skybound.

Next week, an update to Stylizer is going to surface (v4.1) that makes a significant change to the interface. If you’ve been following the forum, you know that there has been quite a bit of a love/hate relationship with Stylizer 4’s main interface design concept known as the Remote Control. In the 4.1 update, we’ve addressed the concerns that were brought up, and the new Remote Control is receiving better acceptance among our Approved Stylizer Fanatics.

To kill two birds with one stone, I thought I would wet everyone’s appetite with some early alpha screenshots of Stylizer 4.1 For Mac, with the revised Remote Control.

We had planned to spend the last few weeks pounding out Stylizer for Mac, but we became side-tracked fixing bugs and refactoring the Remote Control. However, now that most of the bugs have been worked out, and the Remote Control has been cleaned up, it’s time to start focusing on Stylizer for Mac.

So without further ado, here is an early screenshot of Stylizer for Mac with the new 4.1 Remote Control:

It’s official. And I can’t believe I’m able to post this. A new era of CSS creation has begun. Stylizer 4 has shipped.

We’ve just had the longest work-week of our lives. I’ll post more details to our blog about Stylizer 4 when I’m more mentally coherent.

Set your calendars. It’s official. Stylizer 4 will debut on April 4th, 2009. Most likely at around 11:59 PM :)

EDIT: This is the release date for the Windows version. Once the Windows version ships, we’ll be focusing 90% of our development efforts on Stylizer for Mac. We do not have a release date  for Stylizer for Mac yet.

One of the major pitfalls of the current version of Stylizer is that it doesn’t load CSS files if they are being served through server-side code, as is the case with many content management systems. The problem was that after the file is loaded, it would be impossible to save back to the same location, because there would be no way for Stylizer to overwrite the server-side code file.

This is just a short post to inform everyone that we’ve figured out a solution, and the latest internal build of Stylizer 4 is now loading and saving CSS files served through PHP without issues. This should be really great news for users of Joomla, Drupal, and ExpressionEngine.