Posted on Monday, January 14th (4112 days ago)

There’s so much going on in Front End Development that even the experts have a hard time keeping up. In some cases there are so many different school of thought happening at once that you sort of have to just pick one and hope you don’t regret it.

That’s sort of how I was feeling about things like CSS pre-processors and other instances where you write code that generates code. Seems evil.

I could see that it was more than a trend, pre-processing was finding it’s way into nearly every new framework and workflow I was seeing out there.

I gave LESS a try. I liked it. In fact, I liked it so much that I use it for everything. I did not however, opt to use the javascript file/less file on my server setup advertised on the website. Instead what I started to use the LESS app to compile the CSS files on my local machine, then move the compiled CSS to the server.

The LESS app graduated me to using Codekit, which is also the followup release for that program.

I gotta say, Codekit is changing the way I think about things and more importantly, how I DO things.

How I work with Codekit

 
• First I set up a local copy of the site to run on my local machine, with MAMP as my server.
 
• Then I open up the page I’m working on in a browser.
 
• The I edit page and CSS in Coda
 
• Codekit refreshes the page every time I save, decreasing the code/test cycle speed tremendously.
 
• Publish to the production server when finished.

There’s a lot more Codekit can do beside refresh you screen and compile your LESS/CSS code - check it out! http://incident57.com/codekit/

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About Joseph R. B. Taylor

Joseph R. B. Taylor is a humble designer/developer who makes stuff for screens of all shapes and sizes. He is currently the lead UI/UX Architect at MScience, LLC, where he works to create simple experiences on top of large rich datasets for their customers and clients.