Tired of typing out repetitive CSS? Made the switch to Sass and Compass but can’t remember what terminal commands to use? Compass.app might be just the tool you need!
Sass, a self-described “extension of CSS3”, takes some of the hair-pulling out of CSS. The Compass framework makes Sass a veritable Swiss Army knife, taking care of copious vendor prefixes for everything from rounded corners to drop shadows.
But the downside to “preprocessors” like Sass and Less is they require “compiling” files into CSS before you can use them on your site. Though you can follow the Compass guide to install Compass, “watch” a folder, and automatically recompile files for you from the command line, you can easily forget to run it when you’re juggling multiple projects.
Here’s where Compass.app – a GUI frontend for Compass’ command line tool – comes in. It sits in your menubar, out of the way, but dutifully watching your projects and compiling your Sass files as you update styles and add new projects for it to handle.
Although it’s open-source it’s also available to buy for $10. If you’d rather build it yourself, it’s not the world’s most user-friendly install, but if you’re a web developer using Sass and Compass, you’re probably used to the arcane ways of the command line.
Head over to the blog to follow the step-by-step instructions on using Compass.app in Ubuntu.