Open Firefox, activate the Firebug panel, open text editor, place both windows side-by-side, tweak CSS in Firebug, copy and paste code into Notepad++, save, refresh browser, rinse, repeat…
Sound familiar? The part when you CTRL+s, then F5 in the browser is a pain for me, so I spent most of yesterday looking for a solution.
First of all, I’m on a PC running Windows 7, so no, I can’t use Coda or CSSEdit. Anyway these don’t offer all the features of my ideal software.

Features that I want from my ideal software:

1. Target elements like with the Firebug inspect element tool to rapidly select element for which I wish to change the CSS
2. Layout and typographic grid overlays with easy controls for resizing, and as an added bonus, remember the settings per document
3. Embedded browsers for instant preview like Firebug does, but be able to select any rendering engine I want.
4. FTP editing
5. some kind of integrated version control, but with a GUI, not command line
6. a graphical interface for setting CSS3 properties such as gradients, borders, colors,etc… that will generate vendor extension syntax if necessary

First I tried several Firebug extensions that allow to save changes, but they all fail in some respect because they work on calculated CSS, which means that they will only save the CSS used in that particular rendering. You’ll lose the webkit specific declarations, media queries, etc…

I also tried using the Web developer toolbar which has an edit CSS panel with a save button. It has several bugs that make images and backgrounds disappear and other rendering problems.

I also gave Stylizer a try, which comes very close to what I need, except it relies heavily on a GUI for nearly everything, so it’s not up to date with the latest CSS3 properties. If they had a more basic version, which would allow manual coding instead of using the GUI, it may be a winner.

TopStyle also came very close, except the preview browser is internet explorer 8. They tried to include support for Safari and Gecko, but it’s experimental, not supported and I couldn’t get it to work anyway, it crashed everytime.

During my research, I found this article by Jason Santa Maria : http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/a-real-web-design-application/, which comes to the conclusion that there is a need for a web design application for designing in the browser.

I also found a web app called quplo , but it’s very buggy at the moment, I couldn’t make it work.

another web app called buildorpro :
It isn’t open to sign up yet.