a little history

Style Master was first released just over 5 years ago, 9 September 1998.

As an aside, it was my now sadly missed grandmother's 90th birthday. One of her lifelong mottos was "near enough is not good enough", to which, perhaps to my psychiatrist's chagrin, I still very much subscribe.

It wasn't westciv's first application. We had already released Palimpsest, a very sophisticated hypertext knowledge management system for the Mac OS.

It was very well received critically, and sold quite a few copies. We had some pretty high powered users, including Norbert Weiner prize winner Kristen Nygaard. But let me tell you, developing an application that's not quite like anything else, and then trying to take it to the world takes a lot of time, effort and very deep pockets. Maybe the name didn't help.

I still love that application, and when I fire it up, I am still impressed with its power and sophistication (you would hope so, hey?)
From time to time people still write to me, asking whether there will be a Mac OS X version. I'd like to think so, but somehow I doubt it.

But it didn't pay the all the bills, so among other things at the time I taught a bit at TAFE, which is a technical college system here in Australia.

The web was really starting to take off, and I was involved in developing and teaching web development among other things. In 96 or 97, when Netscape 4 started to take off, I learnt about CSS, and started hunting around for a good tool for students to get up to speed with CSS. Everything I found left a lot to be desired, and it didn't take me long to realize that there was an opportunity here...

To be continued.