SimpLESS compiless .less into beautiful .css

by diwank • 14 years ago

92 56 14 years ago

c4urself2• 14 years ago

It's not really different from Less.app and just like Less.app you don't need it when developing locally using the client-side approach. If you make compilation part of your deploy you basically don't need these apps at all.

nixarn2• 14 years ago

Didn't know about less.app until now - thanks!

upthedale2• 14 years ago

Its seems to have a pretty major difference to less.app in that it supports multiple platforms.

Regarding making compilation part of your deployment, you expose yourself to differences between the development and production code which might prove difficult to trace down the line. Keeping your development code as close to your production deployment seems smart to me.

c4urself2• 14 years ago

ok didn't know about the platform support.

i'm curious what use cases have you run into where the less.js produced different css then lessc?

nixarn2• 14 years ago

I think this is really nice. I usually find it too much of a hassel to setup the dev environment with less support. The website is really cool as well - nice work!

michaelkscott• 14 years ago

+1 for really great, usable design.

skrebbel• 14 years ago

Genuinely wondering: it looks like there went a considerable amount of effort into the design, presentation and polishing of what's effectively a small programmer utility. Do the authors expect to somehow generate an income from this? If so, how?

Btw ups for decent cross-platform-ness. Most of the tools in this space are either *nix-only or Windows-only.

dangrossman• 14 years ago

This product is an ad for their consulting service. Think RoR and a younger 37Signals.

lloeki• 14 years ago

What's wrong with putting attention to detail and polish on a project, even if free?

jenius2• 14 years ago

haha first comment that popped into my head "omg you made lessc!"

batista2• 14 years ago

They also packaged it into an app, added friendly notifications to it, made it cross platform, added a nice UI, drag and drop and other good stuff. Do you think making a GUI for a command line utility / lib is something easy to be sneered at?

Btw: "haha" and "omg" are very rarely good comment material. Neither does the "first comment that pops into ones head".

chrisacky• 14 years ago

I'm struggling to get it to run in Linux. The installer doesn't work, and if I run the binary directly, when I drag a folder, it says... (among other things)..

TypeError: Result of expression 'e.dataTransfer' [undefined] is not an object.

Any suggestions?

jkolya• 14 years ago

Doesn't work for me either. It looks like it's a problem with the Titanium App SDK for linux. https://github.com/Paratron/SimpLESS/issues/8

Someone suggested using the Windows installer in Wine. I haven't tried that. I'll just go back to lessc.

dtf• 14 years ago

Same here. I also had to symlink libnotify.so.1 to get it to start (Mint 12).

fooyc• 14 years ago

SASS/SCSS just work on linux ;)

sass --watch does the "compile on save" thing.

EnderMB3• 14 years ago

I'm using SimpLESS at work at the moment, on both Macs and PC's. I did intend to choose CodeKit (same guys as Less.app), but then read their, frankly immature FAQ.

SimpLESS is the perfect name, as the program works brilliantly in the background. I'd highly recommend it for both Mac and PC users.

jenius2• 14 years ago

It makes me sad when overly serious people try to suck all the fun out of content that has personality and humor. He even acknowledges this at the end of his faq. So sad.

speg• 14 years ago

Touché, I was reading his site yesterday and laughed out loud a few times.

Like mentioned above, these apps are programming tools. It's not like he's mass marketing these to uninformed consumers.

eropple• 14 years ago

Humor is difficult to get right. It's very easy to go from humor to douchebaggery in a short step. That dude does, and his product (that, y'know, he wants money for) isn't good enough to offset that for me. SimpLESS, on the other hand, has no such problem for me.

EnderMB3• 14 years ago

As I said below, if you're developing Apple products you run a fine line with humour because a lot of people aren't going to "get it".

Whether it makes you sad or not is irrelevant. What matters is what the users think, and if Reddit's reaction to it is any indication some will think it's funny and some will think the author is a bit of a dick.

I'm willing to bet that those who don't like it aren't Mac users.

samf• 14 years ago

CodeKit seems to have taken your feedback to heart.

batista2• 14 years ago

* I did intend to choose CodeKit (same guys as Less.app), but then read their, frankly immature FAQ.*

Yes, let's please make development less fun, more "corporate" and gray. Humor and professionalism do not match.

Humor is "the quality of being funny", and professionalism is all about "doing your job well". It's obvious that a funny FAQ messes with their ability to code a useful app.

EnderMB3• 14 years ago

I've got nothing against humour in a page, and I quite like most of what is on the page, but what irks me is that there are users who would want to know whether there is a Windows version of his software, only to be told in the FAQ that they'd have to get "a Mac". I remember when CodeKit was being passed around Reddit, and the same point was raised (in less than polite words).

There's nothing from with a bit of personality, but it's a tricky road when you're dealing with Apple products. There's a fine line between coming across as fun and a bit of a dick.

datr• 14 years ago

This is really nice and it looks to be written all in js using Accelerator Titanium. I've never heard of Titanium before anyone have any experience using it? What's it like?

mattberg• 14 years ago

Titanium makes the impossible seem possible with native mobile apps. There are some speed/memory issues at times, but as long as you construct your app with best practices in mind you should be good.

chris_engel6• 14 years ago

Sadly appcelerator has decided to pull the plug on titanium desktop a few days ago. We are currently looking for an alternative to continue the work on simpless in the future but har no luck so far :(

diwank• 14 years ago

SimpLESS and less.app have been around for quite some time now. Yet, it is really painful to see so many developers copying-and-pasting compiled css from the chrome dev console. Further, client-side less.js uses ajax, forcing you to setup a web server on some development environments.

SimpLESS is highly recommended, as it lets you focus on the code rather than figuring out the compilation bit. Auto-minification is a big plus too.

P.S. It's nice to see a good and usable Titanium application. :)

MatthewPhillips• 14 years ago

Could someone who uses less regularly lay out the advantages over vanilla css? I see nesting and vender-prefix normalizing, but to me those are pretty small gains. I'm sure I'm missing something.

helipad• 14 years ago

Once you start using mixins, you'll never go back. Add a clearfix, IE hack or a cross-browser CSS3 property at the drop of a hat, over and over again.

I also find that just due to the nature of the nesting, I'm writing much tidier CSS as a result.

dmvaldman2• 14 years ago

You. Will. Never. Go. Back.

I mean...variables? Do you never have the same width in two places? That is so simple and so huge. Want to make your shade of green 5% darker? Don't look up a new hexadecimal, just say darken(green,5%).

Make a button "class" where the only input is a color, and it automatically generates a cross-browser rounded-corner button with a slight gradient to 10% darker color, 20% darker border, with 20% lighter inset box shadow.

Really. You will not go back.

gerggerg• 14 years ago

http://lesscss.org/

don't think it touches vendor prefixes.

CognitiveLens2• 14 years ago

I think you're right that it doesn't have built-in simplification of vendor prefixes, but they are trivial to implement into mix-ins (the example on the page you linked shows how), and I suspect it's one of the first things people set up when starting with LESS

envex• 14 years ago

Nesting itself is worth it's weight in gold. Add in mixins, variables, etc and it's just icing on the cake.

I also force myself to add hover states to all the links, even if the client didn't specify it in the designs. Being able to use something like:

@link_color: #ffcc66; @link_hover: darken(@link_color, 15%);

is a HUGE perk.

siegecraft• 14 years ago

Also, it makes it super easy to hit the CSS rules-per-file limit that Internet Explorer has.

dmvaldman2• 14 years ago

The idea of compilation-on-save is a very useful one, but here's my only gripe: it needs to be integrated with my IDE. Maybe the idea is that "if you build it, they will integrate."

But until then I have my own solution which is that I have a keyboard shortcut that runs a bash script to compile the .less, focus on/open chrome and reload the page (all in one step!). I use the awesome software (windows and mac) quickkeys to do it.

cmelbye• 14 years ago

Isn't it essentially already integrated into your IDE? You click the save button, and it compiles the less file.

CognitiveLens2• 14 years ago

It's not really integrated because you have to have SimpLESS running in the background whenever you're working on a project - it's not a major hassle, but I noticed a similar friction when working with LESS.app in a project. I could edit almost everything in my text editor and see the results on the page, but would have to leave the editor to start LESS.app when I wanted to tweak the style. Only had to do it once, but it didn't feel like an efficient, integrated workflow.

skilesare5• 14 years ago

The free version of WebWorkbench does this for coffeescipt in Visual Studio. I think the pro version does it for less($29). I'm thinking of paying for it depending on if I can get this simpleLess working on Windows or not.

tormentor• 14 years ago

Is CSS honestly that difficult? I mean I see why this could help but this just seems to add another layer of complication. I don't know maybe I'm just being a cynic with all these sorry excuses for technology.

skilesare5• 14 years ago

This is like saying "Is a hammer really that difficult? Do we really need to add the complication of compressed air? We don 't need these nail guns. I can already get a nail in some wood."

Less compiles to css. It is faster to build great things than with just css. It is easier to maintain. There is almost no reason NOT to us it instead of straight css. There may be other better tools but if you have to build a lot of css, less is a great tool.

mhd• 14 years ago

The problem with CSS is that it's not too difficult, but that its too simple. With your typical usage patterns, you'll create lots of repetition which you have to do manually. And that's true even without the need to support separate browsers.

Whether that really justifies that many preprocessors is a good question, though (Instead of m4 or sth. like that). I'm not too fond of the plethora of cutesy DSLs we've got nowadays. Reminds me of Lisp macro overuse. (Never mind the general problem that all this need for HTML/JS/CSS hackery and abstraction layers probably showas that we need a better solution altogether. As Cato the Elder said: I miss PostScript.)

skilesare5• 14 years ago

Anyone having issues on Windows? I drag my project folder over...I only have one .less file in my /content folder of an asp.net mvc project. simpleLess throws and error saying Syntax Error on line 1.

This Less file works great when using run time compilation.

chris_engel6• 14 years ago

Hey, try saving your lessfile in UTF8 without BOM. Titanium cant handle the BOM and crashes there.

skilesare5• 14 years ago

I guess I'm not hackery enough. I have no idea what this means. I use visual studio to edit this file so I'm tied to how that saves the file. I had actually tried doing a find and replace on the /r/n line endings to see if that was the issue. I have no idea how to tell vs to save without a bytemark.

prima-facie• 14 years ago

I use this script: https://bitbucket.org/wooptoo/bin/src/tip/lc

SimpLESS is better though.

rgbrgb• 14 years ago

I'm so confused why I would use that rather than http://incident57.com/less/

Thoughts?

clone1018• 14 years ago

Because Windows ヽ( ｡ヮﾟ)ノ

chris_engel6• 14 years ago

Nobody says you should use it instead of less.app. We simply made this tool because there was no easy solution available for windows to compile your less files.

abhisec• 14 years ago

They should probably test twitter bootstrap as many folks will use this with bootstrap. Unfortunately bootstrap compile fails.

chris_engel6• 14 years ago

Yes, we are aware of that. We will update to the most recent less version this week, together with a couple of other changes. :)

janus• 14 years ago

Very well polished.

I think it might be super useful to get frontend designers who are afraid of the command line to use LESS even more.

SimpLESS compiless .less into beautiful .css

Related Stories