New web development software for Windows

I’ve written about LESS and Sass before and I’m not overly keen on preprocessing CSS. However, I can see some advantages so I’m slowly expanding my usage of Sass. One of the things that has deterred me from greater use is the tools/software that are available for Windows – or, until recently, the lack of tools. There seems to be a plethora of CSS preprocessors and web development tools (e.g CodeKit, Hammer for Mac) for Mac but not nearly as many for Windows. However, that’s changing and there is some exciting software available now.

The first CSS preprocessor I used was Compass.app which I quite like. It works smoothly, does the job and it’s great value for $10.

Recently, I’ve also been using Prepros which I like even more. It seems very flexible, has a really nice GUI, and can can compile LESS, Sass, Scss, Stylus, Jade, Slim, Coffeescript, Haml and Markdown. Like Compass.app, it has a live refresh extension for Chrome which means that your page auto refreshes whenever you save a file. It comes with a built-in web server but you can also use a custom server. It’s a great piece of software!

Also on my radar is Mixture which is a prototyping and static site generation tool that uses a templating language for building sites. It also gives you multi device testing and a host of other features. Check it out!

These are all great tools and I’m looking forward to working with them some more. At the moment, I’m loving Prepros because it just seems to work so well and is a great combination of simplicity and useful features.

It’s great to see new software from small companies changing the web development arena.