Coda (1.0.5)
So… I’ve been trying out Panic’s 1.0 release of Coda (a nice new web development environment). So far, I’d have to say I’m pretty impressed, especially for a 1.0 version. I don’t see it completely replacing applications like Dreamweaver for me, but I find myself using it more and more, particularly for making quick edits or improvements to sites I only work on sporadically.
Basically, Coda is a trimmed-down development environment with a nicely-featured text editor, built-in FTP functionality, a preview window, Terminal environment and (IMHO) a very nice CSS editor GUI.
Instead of using a fully-featured yet slower app (Dreamweaver, GoLive), or a combination of apps (for instance BBEdit + Transmit + CSSEdit), Coda is especially useful for making quick changes in a website. By launching a single application, the developer can edit the source code, preview and publish changes quickly. I think Coda has the potential to become my primary web application, but I’d first need the following features added or improved:
- Mutli-file search and replace (currently only works within a single page)
- Easy way to publish an internal directory
- Key command to quickly upload (or save and upload) the currently active file
- Improved source code syntax coloring (seems to get confused when mixing languages, like when using PHP to write JavaScript code)
- Transmit-style FTP synchronization tools
But all-in-all, I think Coda is off to a great start, and is being offered for a very reasonable price (currently $79, or $69 for registered Transmit owners) Definitely worth a download.