In the mean time, the only work around I can offer is to delete BookShelf from your phone and reinstall it (for free of course) from the AppStore. You will of course need to re-download all your books, but the stuck/crashing issue won't reoccur.

Sorry for the horrible upgrade experience on this version. I wish I could have found this issue before release, but I have a hunch that it has something to do with how the AppStore upgrade process works. None of my beta testers ran into it because beta versions are installed manually through iTunes and never come over the AppStore. At least that's my best guess...

If you can afford to wait a day or two, the update with the fix may be out quickly, but of course there's no way to predict AppStore approval times.

Sorry about this one, folks!

I spent a few weeks not long ago searching out Mac web design tools and putting them through their paces. I looked at full WYSIWYG tools like Sandvox and Rapidweaver, but both were a bit too invasive in terms of site layout, and neither allowed mixing rich text editing with manual markup creation while still providing a constant live preview.

I've always got my beloved TextMate to fall back on for markup editing, but Apple-Tabbing and hitting refresh in a browser isn't exactly what I have in mind for live preview.

I tried out Coda for a while, but decided to Refrain from that. Nice enough, but not quite. Finally I settled on Espresso, in part because it finally unlocked in the last MacHeist, but more because I already fell in love with MacRabit's CSSEdit which I still use extensively for editing pages that haven't quite turned into "sites" of their own yet.

Espresso's not bad, all told. It's got live preview which you can tear off into its own window. It would be nice if you could dock the preview window to the top or bottom of the editor, but so be it. Espresso doesn't have any kind of rich text editing, but with the rapidly updating live preview, I can pretty much live without that. I still write better markup than any generator I've ever run into.

Still, I was left with the problem of chrome. Espresso does make some valiant effort to preview script files like PHP, but it took one look at my pages and curled up in a ball whimpering in the corner. So I write complicated PHP pages.... It was about that point I decided to scrap PHP for the content pages in the site anyways, so no biggie. But the last thing I wanted to do was end up with all the chrome on every single page. What a maintenance nightmare...

I wrote a bit of Ant script which prepares the XHTML pages before upload. I went with Ant mostly because it's the devil I know very well, being a Java coder by day. Bash, Perl, or <insert scripting language> would surely have served just as well. The Ant script compiles and executes a few Java classes which connect to my MySQL server to get news and FAQ's which are output to XHTML snippets using Freemarker templates (again, the devil I use every day). Finally the Ant script executes an XSLT transformation on all of the XHTML files to apply the chrome and output static HTML files which contain all of the chrome, ready to upload.

This way I only have to update the chrome in one place, but I still don't need any scripting on the webserver to display everything. All of that's great except that live preview only ever shows black text on a white background. Not too helpful that. Today I finally found the missing link.

I had to tweak my XSLT a little bit to make it work. It appears that Safari only has an XSLT 1.0 parser whereas Firefox happily takes XSLT 2.0. Fortunately I didn't have to change much to make 1.0. I had to default some of the xsl:param elements that are normally sent in from Ant to sensible values and also rename all of my source files from .html to .xhtml to get everything to work.

The final result is that I have plain XHTML files with no chrome and live preview WITH the chrome appearing in Espresso. I can edit the basic XHTML files; and in less than a second, the preview updates with all of its chrome-y goodness. The changes to make it all work are pretty minimal.

First, the web pages themselves: All pages must be well-formed valid XHTML. A minimum example looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="apply-style.xsl"?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>News</title>
<link href="style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
</head>
<body>

<div>Put your main content here.</div>

</body>
</html>

The XSLT file that brings the whole thing together looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<xsl:stylesheet
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:html="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml dtd/xhtml1-strict.xsd"
exclude-result-prefixes="html"
version="1.0">

<xsl:strip-space elements="*"/>

<xsl:output
indent="no"
media-type="text/html"
doctype-public="-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
doctype-system="http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"
cdata-section-elements="html:style html:script"
/>
<!-- Default is just copy everything. -->
<xsl:template match="@*|node()"><xsl:copy><xsl:apply-templates select="@*|node()"/></xsl:copy></xsl:template>

<xsl:template match="/">
<html>
<head>
<title><xsl:value-of select="/html:html/html:head/html:title"/></title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"/>
<meta name="description" content="EBook reader for iPhone or iPod Touch"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="iphone,ebook,e-book,reader,electronic,ipod"/>
<link href="{$httpRoot}style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
</head>
<body>
<div id="header">
Header stuff goes here.
</div>

<div id="content">
<div id="maincontent">
<xsl:comment>=======Main Content Starts Here=======</xsl:comment>
<xsl:apply-templates select="/html:html/html:body/*"/>
<xsl:comment>========Main Content Ends Here========</xsl:comment>
</div>

<div id="sidecontent">
Side-nav content here
</div>
</div>

<div id="footer">
<div id="copyrightdesign">Copyright © 2008-2009 Zachary Bedell. All rights reserved.</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

To make all of this work in Espresso, you need to ... do nothing. Just open or create a project for your files, open an XHTML file and launch a live preview for it. Done!