Jan 2012, by Edwin Yip
This is Edwin Yip, a developer who likes software development and good software tools. Before reading, note that you'll have to bear with my non-native speaking English :)
Short version: Initially, I hated that my CSS styles I tweaked using Firebug were not synced back to my source files automatically.
Long version:
About one and half year ago I decided to rewrite one of my product called Gmail Keeper which is for backing up Gmail to local disk.
The software is supposed to be deployed to the users' local computers, so my plan was to write it in Python and provide a web-based UI.
I choose Python because, aside from that I'm a fan of it, it's easy to access many web-based services using Python.
I liked my plan and I started making the web UI's.
As a matter of fact, my background is Delphi (amazing RAD tool for native Windows apps!) and I'm new to the web development field.
I soon realized that, while I can stand that building web UI is not as easy as it's using Delphi, I can NOT bear with that, after tweaking the css styles using Firebug, I had to manually apply the changes to my source code using a text editor (it's Notepad++).
I searched for a solution but nothing was found.
So I started building LIVEditor - its first goal was to let you edit html and css code like using Firebug, but you don't have to manually copy the changes back to your source file!
But LIVEditor is more that that! I have a vision for it.
A recent inspiration is from Bret Victor's mind-blowing Inventing On Principle talk. Details described here.
Stay turned! Web front end developers, if you are on Windows like me.