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From my understanding, the point of the project is to allow developers to edit css and see the results realtime, without having to save, switch windows from their CSS editor to their web browser and refresh the window. Or without having to edit the css in realtime by using Firebug, then edit those changes back into your actual file.

They also give you the option of hosting your CSS file on their servers, which is why you'd need the link to that CSS file.

It's all explained on their website which you might not have read/understood, or maybe I am missing something.

As a web developer working on quite a few projects, this tool seems great, although I can't have them hosting CSS for internal projects.

I did read through the site, and though I did not download the tool and try it out yet, the site seems to be catering to an individual who is used to SSHing in to / FTPing up to a site and hitting refresh (I did this when I was first learning about the web way back when as well, and I can appreciate the productivity gain here).

The hosting of your CSS files on their servers is also not suited for a development environment that has more than 1 environment, as I would not want to be editing files that are on a live server on a regular basis without first making those changes locally (and possibly checking them into an SCM of some sort first) because my css would quickly become out of sync across environments.

May I ask, the projects that you work on, do you have more than 1 environment that you use and do you collaborate with any other developers on these projects?

If you try it out, you'll see that there are two modes, Preview and Published. Your changes don't go to anyone else until you are done with them, so we won't serve up half-baked CSS while you're still working on it. Once you're done, you hit Publish and only then is it live.

They specifically say there are two annoying issues this solves: 1. having to"CTRL-S–ALT-TAB–CTRL-SHIFT-R–JOY!", and 2. editing in Firebug "then trying to extract those tweaks back out of Firebug and into your website’s CSS files".

As far as working on teams, they're "thinking about how to expose your CSS in a versioned way so that you can keep it in Mercurial (with Kiln!), or Git, or whatever other version control software you might be using". Perhaps you're right, it's better to wait until that is implemented if you have that kind of setup.

EDIT: I've started testing it, and you can add other admins and editor users for sites, very nice.

Maybe this isn't obvious, but its a webapp. While technically "download" is still appropriate, I suspect you misinterpreted how it works.

Love the humor and simplicity of this product, but I can't get it to show me the CSS unless I add yet-another <script> and <link> tag to my source.

http://i.imgur.com/eKKxY.png

Seems like a Web Putty browser plugin would help preserve the "local transparent editing a la Firebug" use case. Transparent meaning, no edits to your existing HTML required to demo different CSS stylings. Or am I misunderstanding this?

So, these days this style of thing is not uncommon. For example, much of the Rails community uses Sass, a language which compiles to CSS. In development mode, it gets compiled anew on every page load. This doesn't happen in production: there are a few ways to make it happen, but basically, in production it looks like auto generated CSS sitting on the hard drive waiting to be served up quickly.

Doing the same thing with WebPutty would take maybe a dozen lines of code. I'm assuming anyone with multiple environments can make it happen in their language/framework of choice.

I'm curious if you used this already since you've been working w/ Fog Creek or if this is the first you're seeing it too.

I haven't used it. I will never answer questions about what knowledge I have/had regarding clients' upcoming product releases. You don't have to be Steve Jobs to get touchy about that one, and it's specifically enumerated in most NDAs I sign.

OK, thanks

I can definitely appreciate the usefulness of realtime here, 'n having led teams in the past I'm all for using tools like Sass/less/blueprint/etc that expedite development time and empower the team. I guess it's the 'Publish' part of this tool that is really irking me, as any environment I've either designed or been a part of has always had a process for sending files to live, and it never included editing and saving files already in a live environment without some intermediary testing platform first.

Instead of publish, I'd rather have a button that says 'commit'.

The problem is you can't use webputty locally, it needs to access the page in order to use it. so anything you're working on needs to be live on the internet

Yeah, we're still working on a way to make this work better for the sort of ongoing web development that most HN readers probably spend a good amount of time doing, but we do think it is very useful for smaller sites that don't need parallel deployment of markup and style changes.

We're also releasing this very early, for a Fog Creek project, to see what people think. It might be that this becomes a desktop tool using something like Titanium, or we might try to integrated version control into it as an alternative to publishing. As such, we're open to suggestions and feedback.

First, congrats on the product as I don't want to come off as being a bowl of sour grapes when that's not the case. I totally dig the concept of immediate results for changes made. Like I said in my OP, I'm approaching this from the viewpoint of a team of more than 1 where there are multiple environments to account for so that's my starting point. For a very small team / personal site built using Rails that has no development environment I can definitely see the usefulness of this product.

Thanks! Your point was one we expected to hear, especially here on HN.

We actually did look into getting Mercurial (which is what we use internally and what we provide via Kiln) up and running in AppEngine, which has been done before, but was just beyond the scope of the first phase of the project.

And I agree, I don't think we'd ever host FogBugz's or Kiln's CSS with it on AppEngine, but I do really want to be able to use the editor and SCSS with those projects, so we'll be keeping an eye towards making that more natural.

I partly agree. For example: I don't see any code revisions been maintained for the changes which for any big development firm will be annoying.

I think there is a lot of changes that can be done to make this a better solution. But as it stands if being used by a small company I can see some merits.

However, I would be cautious about putting something in a beta stage on any site with enough value.

We actually do maintain a history of all of the published versions and the current preview version, but we haven't exposed them yet, since it makes the interface more complex, but it is something on our radar.

Thanks great to hear from a company representative directly. Looking forward to giving this a try.

You should edit your post to include reasons why WebPutty is "a bad thing". (I have no idea; I'm a gamedev guy, but I find webdev very interesting. It's hard to know what to avoid and what to embrace when you're new.)

I'd be happy to include an edw519-style bulleted list of why webputty is 'a bad thing', but I guess it depends upon who their target audience is for this product. If they're targeting someone who is used to ssh'ing into their account on their shared hosting company and editing their css 'live', then yes, I think this product provides a benefit to that user.

Any site I've ever worked on I've always had atleast 2 environments, a local environment and a live environment. Any company I've ever been a part of has had at least 3 environments (sandbox/qa/live) and it's very common to have a dev and staging environment on top of those as well. The reason you have a minimum of 2 environments is so that you can do all of your testing without breaking the live environment, which is what this tool seems to ignore.

"Of course, we also let you play with a preview version of your website’s CSS without inflicting any half-baked designs upon your website’s visitors. That’s the version you edit in the WebPutty editor."

"You can always export a pretty-printed version of your website’s CSS at any time (both the preview and published versions)."

See my other post, I believe you have not understood their product very well.