

SimpLESS compiless .less into beautiful .css - diwank
http://wearekiss.com/simpless

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skrebbel
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.

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

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EnderMB
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.

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jenius
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.

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eropple
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.

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diwank
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. :)

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nixarn
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!

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dmvaldman
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.

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

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CognitiveLens
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.

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janus
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.

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skilesare
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.

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

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skilesare
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.

~~~
chris_engel
Well, there should be some setting in VS for what format the ide shouldnuse
when saving the file. I have no idea hOw/where to configure this in VS but the
exact problem you described above was mentioned to us by a couple of users and
it was always because of VS and UTF8 with BOM.

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skilesare
This seems like more of an issue with titanium. They should fix this. If I
start jacking with my file save settings it it going to cause problems when my
team members start opening my files. As much as I don't like MS having
control, titanium should support files that windows produces.

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chris_engel
Yeah, you are right with that. But since appcelerator is dropping the titanium
desktop framework, i don't believe its getting fixed so far :/

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chrisacky
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?

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jkolya
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.

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c4urself
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.

~~~
upthedale
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.

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c4urself
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?

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upthedale
I haven't used Less, although I have been considering it recently.

My point was much more general though. A tool like this seems great to help
catch problems early - earlier than your deployment step. Can you be
absolutely sure that there aren't any latent bugs in Less or differences
between lessc and less.js, such that you could never have any differences
between your less.js-backed dev code and your lessc-backed deployed code? Even
if the codepaths are identical between lessc and less.js, their execution
environments aren't.

All I'm saying is that if you're going to use some _thing_ in your deployment
scenarios, it would make sense to use the _exact_ same thing throughout your
development (where possible). The biggest argument against this in the case of
Less is the hassle of compiling it. That's where a tool like SimpLESS or
less.app steps up.

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Ysx
lessc is part of less.js
(<https://github.com/cloudhead/less.js/blob/master/bin/lessc>), so should be
identical, but fair point.

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MatthewPhillips
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.

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gerggerg
<http://lesscss.org/>

don't think it touches vendor prefixes.

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CognitiveLens
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

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datr
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?

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chris_engel
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 :(

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

SimpLESS is better though.

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

Thoughts?

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chris_engel
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.

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michaelkscott
+1 for really great, usable design.

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tormentor
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.

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mhd
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.)

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

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

