Show HN: Xpressive - CSS3 Live Design Tool for Mac OSX | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Xpressive - CSS3 Live Design Tool for Mac OSX

xpressive.org

84 pointsdilipray23 comments

Looks very impressive; I only do CSS occasionally so an easy tool like this is of value to me. Will try it.

A couple of things: I don't think the dot-org TLD is appropriate for a commercial venture. Your app store link takes me to an itunes web page on the Japanese app store, rather than launching App Store itself.

Hey, The link they pointed is https://itunes.apple.com/js/app/xpressive/id665817114?mt=12

They should have pointed it to global link https://itunes.apple.com/app/xpressive/id665817114

I just downloaded the trial, but the app requires Mac OS X 10.8, I'm still on 10.7. I suggest to put something in the website that it requires 10.8.

I would suggest to make it compatible with 10.7 :)

This is not a fault of Xpressive, but of CSS3's implementation: doesn't it bother anyone that we're in 2013 and we still have non anti-aliased motion graphics?

http://i.imgur.com/GAJuyqV.jpg

Interesting: I'm using Chrome and I don't actually see the graphic you linked. I saw a mess of boxes shaped roughly like what you posted halfway down the page and had no idea what it was. Chrome bug? Or maybe a CSS issue?

I think a double display setup coupled with automatic page refresh after a change is more than enough to efficiently write CSS.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure why they're pushing "live changes" feature so hard. It's been around forever.

Yes, but there may be some non-dev designers that do not yet know how to set it up, or haven't heard of Grunt.

That's what I was wondering about. Grunt is absolutely perfect for these kinds of workflows and if you want realtime changes that don't involve refreshing the page, just use the developer console.

looks fine I may give it a try to compare it with http://brackets.io/ , can you tell me why would someone choose it over an amazing, free and open source project like http://brackets.io/ ? Why should I use it over Bracket ?

FYI, the call to action is obscured (actually it's more accurate to say there is no call to action, i.e. a button to download the app) in iPad portrait mode. You can see this when you resize the desktop browser to that width.

This looks really interesting. Going to give it a play today. I'm interested in how you handle keyframe animations

EDIT I had a quick look through your CSS (which I think is built using Xpressive) overall I think it looks pretty good. Although you could definitely shave of 30% off by inlining some of the rules. For instance for margin:0 auto; you call margin-left:auto, margin-right:auto. The same applies for background, using the shorter version cuts files sizes dramatically

Just for the sake of clarification, I don't think "inlining" is what you're looking for. Using `margin: 0 auto;` is shorthand, not inline. Inline would be `<div style="margin: 0 auto;"></div>`. Definitely don't want that :)

Just purchased the full version for 21.99 on the Mac App Store. Is there an email address to give feedback to? I assume OP wanted feedback?

I found this: xpressive@modulay.com

Also on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Xpressive_Team

I wonder if this kind of native design would be easier to use than fully custom setup that many web applications are creating.

will give it a go, though there are other ways to do the live reload (grunt for instance).

Being able to save code changes in element inspector is nice, any way to do that in chrome?

What were the other killer features?

What does this do that codekit and a browser cant?

How do I get that timeline editing feature in CodeKit and Chrome? Oh, and automating the vendor prefixing. That would be nice as well.

Thanks!

The timeline editing is pretty cool. But you could easily get automatic vendor prefixing with SCSS/SASS (and you should be using a compile-to-CSS language if you're doing serious web design), and automatic reloads with Vogue or LiveReload. If I wanted to do serious CSS animations, though, this is worth a shot - and it's a great tool for inexperienced web designers or those short on time.

I was asking because the OP to my comment implied it could be done with just a browser and CodeKit. I'd rather keep the number of dependencies to a minimum. I haven't used Chrome for front-end dev work for some time, so maybe it's added these features. And CodeKit does compilation, so I figured it would have this.

If I have to go the route of installing a bunch of individual tools and maintaining them separately, then it becomes less appealing.

Yeah, I get that. It depends on how often you do web work. If you do it as often as I do, it makes a lot of sense to put in the extra effort now to streamline you work in the future. But obviously that doesn't apply to everyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com