While Mac users have enjoyed web development preprossing for years with Codekit, Windows users were forced to user multiple applications or roll their own Ruby scripts to get the same effect. Finally a product has come to Windows, and while it may not have all the polish of Codekit, its a great start.
Prepros is an open source web development Preprossor built on the node.js platform. What does that mean? It means that you can have all the benifits of a preprocessed language like Sass, or Coffee Script, without having to run Ruby on your machine.
The program comes as a downloadable executable, so its just double click and let the installer do its work. Once the program is installed you’ll start with the Prepros blank opening page.
By dragging a project folder onto the screen, or clicking the plus icon at the top you’ll add a web project to Prepros’ watch list. I’ve imported a folder called Test.
Here Propros has recognized that my folder had a JavaScript file, a Scss file, and a Haml file. By clicking on each of the files a list of options appears in the right side of the screen. For a JavaScript file you can Auto Compile, Uglify, and Mangle Variable Names. It also gives you the option of setting a name and folder location for the compiled files it produces.
Propros allows you to not only use Sass, but it has the latest version of Compass installed as well. (Compass is a Sass library) This lets you build your style sheet with Sass and Compass, keeping a clean and human readable file and export a minified/compressed CSS file for your website to use.
By Clicking the Image icon in the bottom of the left hand gray box you can bring up the image optimization section of Prepros. This allows you to quickly optimize your web images with just a click of a button. Changing from a gray “Optimize” button to a green “Done” one.
Prepros is a great program that offers a lot, including a built in static file server and live reload. However it still has a few kinks to work out. During the download stage I continually got errors saying the the file was corrupt, and more than once the node.js server which runs behind the scenes crashed. As a suggestion it would be nice if the image optimizer showed how much the file was optimized. Overall Prepros is a great program for a community that was sorely lacking a fully featured web development prepreossor application. With a few more releases it might even give Codekit a run for its money.