The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

Coda is Panic‘s new web development package for Mac OS X, and it recently won an Apple Design Award for a good reason: it’s functional, it’s Mac-like, and it’s beautiful. But when it premiered last April, it would take more than beautiful to convince me to change my web development workflow, particularly at the high price point (a Coda license will sell for $99, however there’s currently an introductory $20 discount, and registered Transmit owners get an additional $10 discount). However, Coda also delivered a web development environment that’s fully integrated and works well, and it has become my new standard piece of software. And I didn’t even have to wait for a MacHeist bundle or anything to be convinced to pay for it!

When you first start up Coda, you’re asked to add the websites that you connect to. If you already use Transmit, Coda offers to automatically import your Transmit favorites. Coda then lists each of your sites as if they’re pages taped up on a bulletin board, which actual Scotch tape showing against a preview of the website. When you open a website or change its settings, the page flips around to fill the screen, using a nice animation (I can only guess what Core Animation in Leopard will bring…).

One of the great things about Coda is that it doesn’t reinvent the wheel. The built-in file browser comes directly from Transmit, except this time it fills the space of the sidebar. When you double-click on the site, it opens up in the sidebar via FTP, however there’s obviously some improvements that have gone in there because Coda’s sidebar tends to be a bit faster than Transmit, plus a bit sleeker. However, the sidebar also lets you browse locally on your hard drive as well, so you’re not limited to FTP. However, the sidebar won’t completely replace Transmit; I still prefer Transmit for my hard-core FTP uploading/downloading, although the interface seems a little inferior.

The other place where Coda doesn’t reinvent the wheel is in the text editor. Coda utilizes the Subetha Engine, which is based off of SubEthaEdit, my very favorite text editor for Mac OS X. And since it’s SubEthaEdit, that means that it brings along the same syntax highlighting patterns, plus the classic SubEthaEdit which allow for multiple users to collaborate online or over Bonjour with other SubEthaEdit or Coda users on the same document. What can I say? I love SubEthaEdit, and seeing it built-into Coda makes the app even better.

Coda also builds in a WebKit preview, which works okay, although since my websites contain a “public_html” directory, the Preview keeps trying to go to http://www.webmacster87.info/public_html/index.php for example, so I tend to find it more practical to use my regular web browser. Hopefully future versions of Coda will include a little more flexibility for the Preview.

Coda also includes a pretty good CSS editor. Users who already have CSS editor tools may still prefer to use them, but if you don’t already have one (I don’t), Coda’s CSS editor is pretty good, and makes it really easy to edit/setup CSS attributes for various IDs and classes, and I’m sure that it will get even better over time. Coda even includes a built-in Terminal. I don’t use it, but I’m sure someone does.

And finally, Coda includes access to a number of books and references built-in, including the Web Programmer’s Desk Reference to HTML, CSS, and Javascript (this book is a $60 value in its printed format). (Coda users also get access to a discount code for the book in printed format.) The PHP manual is also included. The one thing that I find disappointing is that these books require you to have internet access to browse them. Considering that I do a lot of my web development locally while I’m offline, I’d like to be able to browse these references while I’m offline, and I’d think that it wouldn’t be too difficult to include them locally with the application…

But all in all, Coda is a stellar web development platform. It’s fairly rare for me to try out software during its trial period and become hooked to it, but that’s what happened when I tried out Coda. It’s still in its initial release, so we can expect that its minor shortcomings will be fixed in upcoming releases, but for its first release, Coda is an excellent application and has become a permanent part of my web workflow.

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