TopStyle Pro Review
TopStyle - take your styles to the top!
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You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
- Takes really little time on learning to use it
- Lots of features, but no need to use them all if you don't want to
- Configurable interface
- Updatable standards
- A little expensive
I had a really great surprise while testing this application. Needless to say, it takes only 10 MBs of your hard drive and you can install it in less time it takes you to read this whole sentence.
For those who are not willing to buy it before having made a test themselves, TopStyle comes with a 20-day trial period, in which you have full-feature functionality. You also have a tutorial avaible that'll teach you how to get the best of this software and a configuration wizard that'll help you make most of the decisions on how to use this program. Right there you'll choose which style standard to use, which browser to test in, and how you want the interface to look.
Of course, you can always do real fine-tuning in the options dialog, where you can verify all of the possibilities this software offers you. You will see it is fully compatible with CSS (versions 1.0, 2.0, 2.1, Mobile 1.0), Internet Explorer (versions 4, 5, 5 for Mac, 5.5, 6), Konqueror 2.2, Netscape (versions 4, 4 for Mac, 8), Opera 8 and Safari 1.0. Also implementing standards for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1 and 1.1.
This may sound like it takes a lot of knowledge and study to get this application working, but in fact it's just a few clicks away. This program automatically suggests CSS properties as you type, auto-completes HTML tags and matches braces in expressions. If that isn't enough, it also allows you to see a preview of the resulting code in an embedded browser.
On advanced features you can do some site-managing while checking files in a directory view, you can choose whether you want to integrate this editor with HomeSite, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion and FrontPage. You can navigate through CSS classes in your stylesheet, you can navigate your code through links in your HTML code, you can set auto-replace as shortcuts to common strings, you can convert automatically special characters to their corresponding code, you can make TopStyle recognize server-side scripts and map pages to their publication address to see real-generated pages.
But if advanced features are not for you and you just want an easily usable program, you can always stick to TopStyle's multiple document interface, the embedded color picker, the embedded font-picker, the HTML-Tidy generator, the style-checker function, or lots of more feature available in this 10-MB web-design pack.
I would recommend TopStyle to both beginners and advanced programmers. For beginners, it makes it easier to learn not dying while trying to make a web. For advanced programmers, it allows them to forget language nuisances and to really concentrate on the important part: layout, content and design.