YAML, Blueprint, Tripoli, YahooUI - not the latest competition to Rails, Django, CakePHP, or Wicket but a set of CSS frameworks to jumpstart page layout.

I had been using YahooUI (and sometimes the DreamBeaver templates) but YAML’s Builder and Blueprint’s Generator look like good ways to get started.

Or you can always pay someone else to do it.

A plethora of choices.

I’m surprised I haven’t tried this before but you can’t load an external style sheet into Flex. The Adobe documentation mentions loading external CSS files, but they always mean loading a style sheet before you compile your SWF which isn’t what I’d call a true external style sheet.

Thankfully Ruben has written a class that will do just that.

Flex’s implementation of style sheets is really wacky, every time I set paddingTop, paddingLeft, paddingBottom, paddingRight all to say 10px I go mildly insane because a) why can’t I just write it once ‘padding: 10px’? and b) why deviate from the CSS the rest of the world is used to, ‘padding-top’ etc.?

The blog gets a refresh. This is a preview of the new vixiom.com which has been under redesign for about a year now :P

The blog has almost become my main site, I get all my new leads through it (or word of mouth). In my not too distant youth I used to think you needed your website to be teh awesomest to generate work. Now my sphere of influence doesn’t even include any of the site of the day sites.

I’m moving closer (or back) to minimalism anyways, Peter Saville (he of Joy Division, New Order fame) has always been my favorite designer.

I like the way a lot of sites have been going, now that 980px wide is the new normal there’s a lot of minimal maximalism going on (simple and clean but with a lot of content) see the latimes.com redesign, Pownce, and Google’s wikipedia clone. Hopefully the pastel web 2.0 days are behind us.

Beige is the new lime green.

I’ve been using CSSEdit for the last couple of months and it’s sharply increased my productivity when working with style sheets. Today MacRabbit released version 2.0 (of course) and it is jaw-droppingly good, TextMate good.

There are five major new features but my favorite so far is ‘Overridding’ which as the name suggests give you the ability to override live website styles. As it can overide live sites you can do away with the edit>save>refresh>test method when making style sheet changes on a dynamic site. Changes can be previewed without even saving the style sheet. In the screen shot below I’m changing the a:link color of the blog with the color wheel.

Overriding extracts the style sheets from the live site so all you rip-off artists can extract style sheets even faster than before! :P

Another cool new feature is ‘X-ray’ which let’s you select page elements such as a divs margin and padding. The page elements are listed hierarchically (html>body>div#container>div#sidebar>div#links) so you can easily select a parent object.

A new feature I know I’ll be using a lot is ‘Milestones’ which are similar to Photoshop’s history and layer comps, you can set a milestone and then proceed down different roads without fear of losing your original style if you make a mess of things.

Version 2.0 is much snappier than the old version and it looks great too, it makes use of newer Apple interface elements you’d see in the latest iTunes and the Pro Applications.

If you do web design/development on a Windows box, and TextMate wasn’t enough of a reason to dump your fugly PC and even worse OS, you’d be crazy not to switch after using CSSEdit.