Hello, I’m New

Hi, my name is Ian Beck, and I’m very happy to announce that I’m now a full-time member of MacRabbit! Jan was having fun working on the latest and greatest improvements to Espresso and CSSEdit, but he had a problem: his supply of carrots kept running low and Norbert was getting antsy.

“Ian,” he said to me, “this just won’t do. How good are you at harvesting carrots? And incidentally I could also use someone to help out with support and quality assurance.”

“Well,” I replied, “that sounds like fun, but what’s in it for me?”

“How do you feel about fresh radishes?” said he. “Oh, and helping make Espresso even more fantastic than it already is?”

I don’t know how he guessed, but I’ve always been a sucker for really crisp, fresh radishes.

Starting today, I will be handling the bulk of MacRabbit’s support, doing quality assurance, developing internal Sugars, and just generally making sure that using MacRabbit products is as easy and care-free as can be for you folks.  I’ve been developing Sugars and themes for Espresso on my own time since the early semi-private betas, so I’m ecstatic to finally be able to give Espresso and CSSEdit my complete focus and offload some of the tasks from Jan that were slowing down the pace of development.

I look forward to talking with you in the forums and via our support email!

Ian is the ideal ambassador for the great products Jan develops and I think the work Ian has already done on the forums has proven that.

This is great for all us CSSEdit and Espresso users! Brilliant stuff guys, brilliant.

with best regards,
Karn.

#1 - May 31st, 2010 at 6:59 PM

Karn Broad

This is great, you’ve always been very supportive on the forums, you could think you were part of MacRabbit already. I’m sure this will help Espresso to a higher level than it already is :) Good luck Ian ;)

#2 - May 31st, 2010 at 7:08 PM

BloodDragon

Welcome!

#3 - May 31st, 2010 at 8:00 PM

Steffen

Warm welcomes, Ian. It sure will make a difference on MR development pace, now that you’re on board. This is great news!

#4 - May 31st, 2010 at 8:13 PM

Alexandre

Welcome Ian!

#5 - May 31st, 2010 at 8:51 PM

Maxime Brusse

Welcome Ian! From the support / code you’ve given in the forums I’m sure you’re going to be a great member of the MR team!

#6 - May 31st, 2010 at 9:47 PM

Daniel

Very nice Ian! This takes a lot of support work off of Jan’s shoulders.
So let’s hope Jan can focus on development more now.

Really looking forward to a major update of Espresso.

Congratulations to all of you!

#7 - May 31st, 2010 at 10:31 PM

Werner

You’re already doing a good job Ian! I have reported some bugs and crashes and been friendly meet by Ian!

Hope you have the time of your life!

#8 - May 31st, 2010 at 11:46 PM

Josua Pedersen

This is excellent news. Just great.

#9 - June 1st, 2010 at 3:24 AM

Tom Kercher

Congratulations Ian! Would like to see big improvement of the internal JavaScript Sugar – auto-completion,Snippets.

#10 - June 1st, 2010 at 4:45 AM

Aleejean

Thanks Ian, it’s great that Jan will be able to spend more time working on the products. I’ve been using CSS Edit since the 1.x days and would really love to see an update (with things like rounded corners, gradients, and transitions in the palette… and maybe even SASS/SCSS friendly).

#11 - June 1st, 2010 at 5:38 AM

Nathan Youngman

That’s just great news!
I love Espresso. I can’t live without it. And I’d love to see a faster development-pace.

Matching brackets please ;)

Keep up the great work guys. Can’t wait to pay for Espresso 2.0!

#12 - June 1st, 2010 at 8:51 AM

jpdamen

Welcome on-board Ian! Hope you can continue to improve an already great set of products.

#13 - June 1st, 2010 at 9:06 AM

JP

hi Ian
That’s great news and I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say I really appreciate all your (volunteer) work to date on the forums and development.

I confess I’m still using TM for 90% of my work despite loving E in many ways. I still require the project-wide search results as they are displayed in TM (i.e. listed line-by-line) — my projects (PHP/CSS largely) have hundreds of files and I have to look through them systematically. Any chance this will happen? It would make me a happy bunny :)

Good luck and congrats, and thanks to MacRabbit for taking you on properly.

#14 - June 1st, 2010 at 10:23 AM

pavel

Awesome, Espresso and CSS Edit are great products! I use them for the majority of my development. Cheers!

#15 - June 1st, 2010 at 3:22 PM

Brian

Just as I was about to shell out for Coda…

Ian, it would be good to inform users of upcoming developments for Espresso and CSS. Whilst I understand that sometimes it’s not good to promise what’s coming in case users get disappointed, I’d at least like to know where Espresso is going. When you guys go quiet I start having thoughts about Coda…. the only thing that keeps me here is the hope that one day Espresso will be as polished as CSSEdit.

#16 - June 1st, 2010 at 3:48 PM

Jay

@pavel I’ve noted the problems you’re having with project find/replace in our bug tracker. We’re unlikely to exactly mimic Textmate’s UI, but we may well be able to find ways to offer alternate UI or improve what’s there to better handle large quantities of files.

@Jay Espresso is going someplace awesome. :-)

In all seriousness, we don’t have anything specific we can announce yet. Pre-announcing stuff is a great way to ensure it never sees the light of day *cough*TextMate 2*cough*.

If anyone has other quibbles or feature requests for Espresso, please send them via Help->Send Feedback in the app. I’ll try to track everything from this comments thread, but if it gets too large it’s going to be difficult.

#17 - June 1st, 2010 at 5:10 PM

Ian Beck

Awesome news! I’m super glad CSSEdit will get some more attention, it’s much needed. Welcome Ian :)

#18 - June 1st, 2010 at 7:00 PM

Tobias Ahlin

Ian,

OK I understand your TextMate 2 reference, but truth is I have actually considered TextMate because the developer has blogged every now and again that he’s still working on it. At least it gives some kind of indication that it’s being worked on.

The feature I’m hankering after most with Espresso is a live preview of dynamic content e.g. php so I can edit Wordpress templates. CMS is becoming an increasing probability these days. Even Dreamweaver has added this to their cluttered UI now.

No. 2 feature is X-Ray.

No. 3 is baked-in integration with CSS Edit.

Thoughts?

#19 - June 1st, 2010 at 7:43 PM

Jay

@Jay We’re definitely still working on both Espresso and CSSEdit. (Jan is at this moment working on some error-handling code for Espresso, and I’m trying to reproduce errors and crashes.)

The three features you mentioned are all definitely on our radar. When/how/if we implement them will largely depend on balancing them against other features and needs of the two programs, and unfortunately I can’t really say anything specific at this point.

#20 - June 1st, 2010 at 8:12 PM

Ian Beck

Congrats Ian. I’m glad to see the Macrabbit universe expanding. Being new to this web development world I was lucky to have two great programs like CSSEdit and Espresso to ease the learning curve. Having tried all the rest, those are the best. I look forward to seeing Macrabbit grow and invent.

Cheers.

Scott

#21 - June 2nd, 2010 at 9:22 AM

Scott

Aawesome, Ian. Congratulations!

#22 - June 3rd, 2010 at 12:53 AM

Brett Terpstra

Welcome Ian. I sure hope CSSEdit get some attention. Hasn’t been updated in years (aside from the recent minor update). I love it and use it almost every day. I couldn’t live without it. I’d have a much harder time making a living without it. But it needs some attention. For instance:

- Keychain support
- Webkit update (rendering engine is out of date)
- CSS3 support (I know it’s not a spec yet, but people are using a lot of it now)
- Better support for shortcut declarations and pseudo classes
- Completely collapsible “Styles” pane. I never use it. Just takes up space.

In a perfect world… multiple rendering engines would be amazing too… so you could preview how your work would look in IE for instance. But I’m sure that’s FAR too ambitious and would never happen.

#23 - June 3rd, 2010 at 7:18 PM

David

p.s. You should put a link to the forums on your website somewhere. All these years and I never knew you had a forum until reading about it in these comments!!!!!!! I had to do a Google to find the link.

#24 - June 3rd, 2010 at 7:21 PM

David

Great move Jan! Welcome Ian. May the light of a thousand suns grace your radish garden.

#25 - June 4th, 2010 at 1:46 AM

jesse

I’m happy to hear there’s someone new for support. I’m using CSSEdit and Espresso and sent two emails (concerning CSSEdit) last month (May 13 and May 24) and haven’t heard back. I see here there is a forum somewhere. I may try to find it if I have time…
Cheers and good luck.

#26 - June 4th, 2010 at 4:21 PM

Dominique Martel

“I look forward to talking with you in the forums … ” …what forums are those? Where?

#27 - June 10th, 2010 at 10:54 AM

Jim

I sent already three (!) mails to macrabbit’s support, but I did not get any answer. It’s a real shame! I buyed CSSEdit a few years ago, but I cannot longer install it, as there is no more working version for MacOS X 10.4. Actually, version 2.6 did run under Tiger, but version 2.6.1 does no longer. All I want is a download link to version 2.6. Thanks!

#28 - June 10th, 2010 at 12:06 PM

morannon

We already know “Communication” is the worst part at Macrabbit.
They just don’t seem to want to inform us (customers) about what they are doing and don’t want to respond to emails…

As quoted from above: “It’s a real shame!”

#29 - June 11th, 2010 at 11:42 AM

Werner

For those looking for them, the forums are located here:

http://wiki.macrabbit.com/forums/

@Dominique and others: I only recently started going through the CSSEdit boxes (been cleaning up the backlog for Espresso). You’ll probably get a response today or tomorrow.

At this point, I’m very close to being caught up on backlogged support requests, and my current turnaround for new requests is typically about a day at the current volume. If you’ve emailed recently and haven’t heard back, please do not hesitate to email again to pester me.

#30 - June 11th, 2010 at 4:11 PM

Ian Beck

Nice to know there is a forum. It should have separate discussion areas for Espresso and CSSEdit though. I don’t use Espresso and don’t plan to. Would be nice to see just CSSEdit stuff.

#31 - June 15th, 2010 at 4:37 PM

David

I’m hoping this will spark more updates to Espresso, It’s starting to feel like the TextMate of late, no updates :/

#32 - June 17th, 2010 at 7:11 AM

Mark

Glad to know there’s an Espresso forum, but is there one for CSSEdit?

#33 - June 17th, 2010 at 7:10 PM

theFreelanceDesigner

From an economical standpoint I can clearly understand why you would choose to keep CSSEdit’s features away from Espresso.
But it’s just ridiculous to do so. Espresso would clearly benefit from features such as X-Ray, milestones, and validation.

Also, the amount of updates Espresso has received since it went final has been almost non-existent. This is new software, in desperate need of further development, yet there are still lots of bugs that aren’t being squashed and feature requests being ignored. Ever since the final came out (with so much bug that it seemed like a joke at the time!) I’ve had the feeling that the only thing that counts is the money. Well, if you want to keep people paying for your software something will have to change.

#34 - June 21st, 2010 at 11:14 AM

John

@John, you said it exactly how I feel. I’ve bought Espresso and I’m really regretting my purchase. If MacRabbit wants Espresso to be a viable choice they HAVE to keep fixing and updating. Jan (MacRabbit) needs to be more vocal on the status, because as of right now any more revisions seems like vaporware. I’m happy to see Ian on board but at this point I feel like it’s just lip service, come on MacRabbit step up to the plate and start getting aggressive.

#35 - June 22nd, 2010 at 1:37 PM

CSSGuru

Yeah!!! CSSEdit could use some love. Feel like it´s a dead product…

#36 - June 22nd, 2010 at 5:54 PM

Mario

We’re hard at work, but the updates can’t be ready sooner than they’re ready!

#37 - June 29th, 2010 at 2:23 PM

Jan Van Boghout