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Beta Beat: MacRabbit's Espresso released as public beta
Espresso, the highly-anticipated web design and development platform from MacRabbit (creators of CSSEdit), has been released as a public beta (originally predicted for late November). It's not finished (that's why it's called beta, silly), but it's far more complete than what we've seen thus far. The auto-completion capabilities of the editor are well-developed, support for HTML, XML, CSS and Javascript is included, and the live preview is working nicely. The array of available Sugars, as the extension packages are called, is frequently being added to by users, and support for additional languages is already available. A few themes, some ported from TextMate, can also be found on the wiki. Web developers who have used CSSEdit are familiar with the simple interface which belies many powerful features. You can expect the same from Espresso. Coda users will be interested as well; when Espresso is feature-complete, you can expect a TUAW-style head-to-head comparison of the two. Personally, I'm a die-hard TextMate user, which any of the TUAW crew can attest to. I always have trouble getting into new editors, no matter how rich their feature set may be. I stopped editing CSS in TextMate when CSSEdit came out, though; there's just no comparison. Knowing CSSEdit the way I do, Espresso may be the platform which finally pulls some of my TextMate loyalty away ... at least for web design. You can grab the time-limited (30 days) beta from MacRabbit's site. If you're a developer, make sure you check out the wiki. For me, the most appealing aspect of Espresso is its extensibility, and a look through the SDK should pique the interest of any code-sligner.
Espresso testers selected, beta coming late November
If you've been salivating for a shot of Espresso, the upcoming integrated web development environment for Mac OS X, you'll have to wait just a little bit longer. An email sent this morning by the developer, MacRabbit's Jan Van Boghout, confirmed the status of those accepted into the beta program, but he also indicated that the top priority was to give plug-in developers working with the Sugar framework "a solid SDK to start with." Van Boghout expects that the company will release a beta in late November. Espresso, which stares Coda straight in the eye and says, "Yeah, I'm lookin' at you," is from the same people who make CSSEdit, and was announced in mid-September.
A quick shot of Espresso for web designers
Word is out ... there's a new contender for the do-it-all web design and development title belt. Espresso has been announced by the creators of CSSEdit, and it looks like major competition for a TUAW favorite, Coda. Espresso looks like it's going to be a solid editing platform, with an advanced XHTML editor (with spell checking in non-code contexts), live preview (even for database driven applications), advanced search with regular expressions, tabbed interface and sidebar tools and, of course, the things we love about CSSEdit throughout the interface. Espresso will ship with support for HTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript, but here's the really impressive part: it -- not unlike TextMate -- is going to be very extensible. Using XML-based "Sugars," you can add new languages, CodeSense support and more. An SDK will be available for those who wish to earn the title "Sugar Daddy." I'm looking forward to this release with great anticipation, and the chatter around TUAW indicates I'm not alone. You can sign up for updates on the Espresso page at MacRabbit.
Give VLC a makeover
I love VLC, the open source cross platform media player, but the cone icon isn't all that great. Imagine my surprise as I was clicking around the MacRabbit website (after checking out CSSEdit 2.0) and I came across the VLC Makeover Kit. It replaces all the stock icons with cool silver and black ones. Silly? Perhaps, but it sure looks much nicer in my Dock now.
CSSEdit 2.0
I'm not a designer, heck I'm hardly a writer, but I do know good software when I see it (and a cute company logo). CSSEdit is a good piece of software, and it has only gotten better with version 2, released today. But what is it, you ask? CSSEdit is the premier CSS editor (that's Cascading Style Sheets to you) for OS X. Version 2 is faster, can save CSS from a remote website better, and auto saves your work. The big ticket feature is previewing CSS for dynamic applications (think blogs).A demo is available while a full license will cost $29.95.
