News

In addition to Safari 3 compatibility, Xyle scope 1.2 adds major new features making it even easier to debug and fine-tune cascading style sheets. Main new features are

• Significantly improved live editing
• Content driven sites like blogs, wikis or forums can be styled with local style sheets even if they reside on a remote server
• Integrated CSS 2.1 properties reference
• iPhone and custom user agent strings

Xyle scope 1.2 is a free update for all existing Xyle scope users.

Everyone anxiously waiting to use Safari 3 and Xyle scope can now rejoice and download Xyle scope 1.2 beta. Besides Safari 3 compatibility, version 1.2 also contains some major new features like full live editing support and the ability to save style sheets even if a page was accessed through a web server. For a full list of the new features please consult the documentation that comes with the beta (choose “Support Pages” from the help menu). As usual don’t forget to completely backup all style sheets associated with the pages you are experimenting with!We will be making more announcements in the weeks and months ahead, so be sure to stay tuned…

Apple caught us completely by surprise by releasing Safari 3 Public Beta months ahead of Mac OS X Leopard. Safari 3 installs a new version of WebKit which is not compatible with Xyle scope 1.1.8. Many features of Xyle scope won’t work when Safari 3 is installed.We have shifted our development resources from our forthcoming application to fixing these compatibility issues. We hope to provide you with an update within the next few days.In the meantime, if you want to sneak a peek on Safari 3, just go ahead and install it. Once you are done playing around with the new features, you can simply use the uninstaller provided by Apple to restore both WebKit and Safari. Afterwards Xyle scope will be fully functional again. Be aware, however, that you have to restart your computer both after installing and uninstalling Safari 3.

A few days ago it was brought to our attention that Xyle scope wouldn’t run when the user had chosen Hebrew as the main user interface language for Mac OS X. It turned out that Mac OS X’s excellent support for bidirectional languages together with some ignorance on our part about the subtleties involved were responsible for the problems.

Whenever users chose a language with a bidirectional script such as Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Hebrew, or Yiddish as their main user interface language Mac OS X occasionally inserts bidi related punctuation characters (202A-202E) even in plain old ASCII files. The reason presumably is to support situations such as in Hebrew where text is written right to left, but numbers and other English content is still written left to right.

Beginning with version 1.1.8 Xyle scope now runs fine under bidirectional language settings.

It was one time to many that we headed towards the bookshelf to look up that one CSS property we couldn’t quite exactly remember… So we decided there should be an online reference that is simple and fast to use.

Today we proudly present version 1.0 of our Interactive CSS 2.1 Properties Reference. The idea was to use a desktop application like interface that would allow to present all the information in a single compactly sized window. There is thus no need to scroll or to load new pages while browsing the reference.

This is made possible by extensive use of DOM scripting. Indeed our secondary goals was to learn our share from Jeremy Keith’ fine book and finally get at peace with JavaScript… If you’d like to know whether JavaScript is also for you, check out the slides of Keith’ 2005 presentation and the interviews by the Digital Web Magazine and the Web Standards Group.

We expect our reference to be of most value to users with an intermediate knowledge of CSS who want to get a complete overview of all CSS properties or a simple reminder of some unfamiliar properties or values.

Does our reference work for you too? Should we do more along these lines? Tell us what you think!

A new online magazine just happened to knock on our doors yesterday; and it didn’t come without presents… From their about page:

“The web has undoubtedly entered a new and exciting phase. Designers, developers and entrepreneurs are energized, refueled and producing some mind-blowing projects. The buzz is most definitely back! Vitamin is a brand new online magazine dedicated to that new web industry.”

With an advisory board as impressive as this one and correspondents around the world success will be difficult to avoid. Our favorites so far are (of course!) John Hornbaker’s excellent review of Xyle scope and an interview with CSS Zen Garden cultivator Dave Shea. He talks about CSS3, IE7, web professionals and his favorite tools. Will he have something to say about Xyle scope? You bet!