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April 24, 2007

software

I’ve reached a coda in my Coda examination

Posted Apr. 24, ’07, 1:50 PM PT by Pat Nakajima
Category | Software

Well, I’m not ready to deliver my dissertation on Coda quite yet, but I do have some initial thoughts, based on the limited time I’ve had with the app so far.

First, if you’re any sort of web developer, you need to at least try this application. It is an experience to behold. Not only has Panic created one of the slickest applications I’ve seen on OS X, but also one of the smartest. Unfortunately, its intelligence makes the slip ups all the more glaring. For instance, while editing a WordPress template via Coda’s phenomenal FTP setup, I found myself needing to repeatedly tell the text editor what kind of file I was editing. Not the biggest thing in the world, but also not something I ever need to do with TextMate.

The more I think about it, the more I start to realize that what I wrote in the previous paragraph has been the only sour part of my Coda experience. I’m still working in TextMate, Terminal and Firefox, just because I’ve got that workflow so finely tuned, but if somebody, some genius of geniuses, creates a way for me to convert my TextMate snippets and syntax color settings to Coda’s format, I might just have to hop on the “Coda is revolutionary” train. It’s really that good. More to come.


4 Comments

E.T.Cook said:

Let it be clear that Coda is in fact only for very low level web development. If it had subversion capabilities built in, as well as support for multiple instances of terminal (both local and remote), versioning etc etc, I would think this tool is a God send. For anyone that does any project level development, or uses frameworks etc, I just can't see where this is of much use to me.

Maybe I am not seeing something...

April 24, 2007 5:56 PM
Bruno Correia said:

I like seeing change of ideas in the way we work and panic is without a doubt an outstanding company, but honestly I have tried TextMate and a few other options however when it is time to get the work done Dreamweaver has always been my favorite code writer. Specially now with CS3.
— Does anyone else feels the same?

April 24, 2007 11:05 PM
Tony said:

I've been playing with coda, and while I like it as a basic editor, I don't think I'll be switching any time soon. Has anyone figured out how to get tags to auto close, like most other web editors? (ex: type an opening tag, like , and it automatically adds the closing tag, . I can't seem to find that feature...and that would kill it for me. I hand-code everything, so auto closing is a must. Another gripe: when downloading something from the remote site, it puts it in the root of your local site...it doesn't keep the directory structure. So far I like Dreamweaver's hand coding and site management features much better. Maybe version 2 will be more useful for anything but the most basic pages.

April 25, 2007 8:45 AM
Moe said:

I played with Coda, and I must say it's very slick. It would replace the 3 programs I use right now (Taco, Fetch, Safari) except that it's a little beyond my price range.

As I was using it I was impressed enough to consider buying it, until I went to their site. I was expecting around $25USD, not $80USD. That's roughly what I paid for Photoshop Elements, and I'm still stinging from that one.

It's a nice product, but Panic is just a bit too proud of it for me to purchase it.

April 26, 2007 5:59 AM

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