Lawrence Ingraham’s Blog

Was really impressed with this new app and thought I’d share my 2 cents for anyone interested.

Coda was released last week by Panic, makers of killer ftp client Transmit and usenet app Unison. The goal of Coda is to combine your web development workflow into one app; coding your html, designing your CSS, previewing in webkit, bugfixing your javascript and transferring files. It does this quite well with a very polished interface which actually makes me excited to develop.

http://www.panic.com/coda/

You can take a look at the official site to get an overview of the app, I’m not going to go through that there. They explain it much better than I ever could anyway. I will however list a few goods and a few bads for anyone interested.

The goods:
Real pretty interface which is easy to use. to me, having a pretty app makes me enjoy using it. I’ve used BBEdit for years and switched to TextMate just a few months ago for my text editing. They’re both very bland and, well, texty. Coda just looks pretty. Little example, when clicking on the open bracket to some php function, the closing bracket will emit a little blue circle so you know where the function ends. Fun.

Uses webkit to allow live previewing of a page you’re creating. This really helps when in the preliminary page development, tweaking the CSS a bit to make it look right, changing font sizes or margins, etc. Sure you can do this with a web browser side by side with a text editor hitting refresh every time you make a change, but it’s much nicer to see it live. I will still launch Opera and Firefox to test compatability, as well as IE in parallels, but for the first run at development this is great.

Allows you to set up multiple sites with multiple local file locations, server login info, etc. This really helps when you’re managing a few sites at a time on different servers. While you’re working on a site, you can have multiple pages open at once, and when you close Coda for the day then start up again tomorrow, it’ll remember what pages you had open. Little things to help speed up my workflow.

The bads:
Unless I’m not looking hard enough, I can’t figure out a good solution for supporting php files locally. I’d like to preview the changes I make but it always comes up
as text in Preview mode unless I’m editing on the server. That would be fine, but then I need to have the server version of the file automatically sync with the local version of the file after a change is made, which I don’t think is happening now.

Issues with CSS which use @import to link to a master css file, which I believe most designers do. When I try to edit the css of the page selected, I get a “This file does not contain any defined CSS styles” error unless the CSS is actually in the page. Ideally, it would look for the @import on the page and bring up that file for editing.

Uploading files from nested directories always go to the root of the site. For example, I have a Local and Remote connection with matching files and folders. When I upload something from my /img/logo folder on my Local drive, it goes to / on the server. This is a big problem which I’m sure they’ll fix, but it’s been bugging me this weekend.

All in all, I think a great first effort. I paid my $69 just now after a weekend of testing it, though there is a 14 day trial is you’re interested. I’ll still keep using Textmate and Transmit for a few things, but I’m looking forward to using Coda for any web development in the future.

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