The personal disquiet of

Mark Boulton

April 23rd, 2007

To Coda

{title}A while ago, Mr Hicks poin­ted me in the dir­ec­tion of a beta test for a new applic­a­tion by Shock­ingly Good Mac Soft­ware com­pany, Panic. So, for the past couple of weeks I’ve been using Coda and, truth be told, being a ter­rible beta tester. Although, you could put this down to Panic pro­du­cing lovely, bug-free software.

{title}

Coda’s inter­face show­ing the range of fea­tures avail­able: CSS editor, FTP upload, Ter­minal. Oh, and books too!

Tim­ing is everything

Coda came at just the right time for me. I’d used skEdit for a while and more recently star­ted using Text­Mate. The former is just how I like my text apps; small, light­weight and lean on func­tion­al­ity. The lat­ter has fant­astic sub­ver­sion integ­ra­tion in addi­tion to a load of other stuff I’d just never ever need. Then along comes Coda, just as I’m flounder­ing about as to which applic­a­tion to use and blows them both out of the water. Panic have focussed heav­ily on one aspect of simple html/css devel­op­ment: workflow.

Edit, Save, Upload, Test and Repeat

How often do you get into that pat­tern of tasks? I do, all the time. Coda deals with this in a simple eleg­ant way. You can set up sites by import­ing your Trans­mit favour­ites, or by cre­at­ing new ones. Sites not only have the FTP details, but local folders too. The neat thing in Coda is, you pub­lish files by simply right click­ing on them (or select­ing a few). Edited files are indic­ated by a small circle (until you save them) and can also be uploaded. Coda’s slick integ­ra­tion makes the work­flow of pub­lish­ing to the web a pain­less joy. 

Not just a text editor

Coda ships with a CSS editor as well. Some­thing with the power of CSSEdit com­bined with Trans­mit and then the ease of a text editor like skEdit bolted on. Have a look at the fea­tures. Once you’ve decided you want to buy it (because why would you not want this soft­ware), it’s avail­able for a lim­ited time for only $69 (if you own Trans­mit — if not it’ll cost you $79).

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36 Responses to “To Coda”

  1. Jeff Croft said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 2:02 pm

    Coda looks beau­ti­ful, but without Sub­ver­sion hooks and Text­Mate bundle com­pat­ib­il­ity, it’s prob­ably not so use­ful for me. Bummer.

  2. Colly said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 2:22 pm

    I have to be hon­est, it is rock­ing my world. I’d longed for a sim­pler website-in-one-windowtool for the easier, day-to-day jobs. Some­times an applic­a­tion comes along that feels like it was buit espe­cially for me personally. 

    For me, it is handy to have Text Mate and Trans­mit on hand for the heav­ier jobs, but in gen­eral this will be all I need, aside from EE tem­plate work. 

    If only Pho­toshop was in one of the tabs!

  3. Chris Griffin said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 2:37 pm

    Yea, too bad no sub­ver­sion hooks, and I’m not sure how well it would handle RoR pro­jects for that matter.

    Because of Sub­ver­sion, Trans­mit has star­ted to col­lect dust on my mac as there is no need for FTP anymore. 

    Seem use­ful for the right kind of web designer / front-end developer–unfortunately, that does not include me.

  4. Mark Perkins said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 2:59 pm

    Gotta agree with Jeff and Chris I’m afraid — a lovely tool for the right per­son, but without the kind of power and customise-ability that Text­Mate and it’s bundles gives me I just can’t see myself using it. 

    Shame really as I love trans­mit and to have that power more tightly integ­rated into my work­flow would be a huge plus.

  5. soho said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 3:12 pm

    off-topic: you can make a screen­shot of a single win­dowwith command+shift+4, fol­lowed by space; the res­ult are cleaner screenshots :)

  6. Mark Boulton said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 3:48 pm

    soho: Yeah, I know. Lazy as I am, this was just pulled from the Coda web­site and scaled to fit my grid. 

    Jeff Croft: You know, If I’d not only just star­ted using Text­Mate, then I reckon I’d not be too ser­i­ously look­ing at this. Thing is, for a couple of pro­jects I’m goign to have to use Text­Mate simply because of the Suver­sion integ­ra­tion. For 90% of my work though, this is just the ticket. I do hope they integ­rate Sub­ver­sion at some stage though. 

    Colly: I know what you mean. It’s the whole work­flow thing that got me. Coda replaces three apps in that work­flow pro­cess. Brilliant.

  7. Colly said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 3:52 pm

    Yeah Mark — got a load of EE admin tabs open it now, all logged in edit­ing my tem­plates, and man­aging FTP files in oth­ers, amongst sev­eral other things. Superb for (as you say) 90% of site main­ten­ance stuff.

  8. Jonathan Barrett said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 4:01 pm

    You know I bitched about RoR and Sub­ver­sion integ­ra­tion on Stevenf’s site, then it hit me: THERE“S A FREAKING TERMINAL BUILT IN. 

    I think what everyone’s focus­sing on is the “text editor plus FTP cli­ent” deal, which to be hon­est is what Trans­mit did any­way, but think about hav­ing your Rails app run­ning in one tab, tests in another, a third tab doing your SVN/SVK checkins, a fourth for your cap deploys, and then you’re in CSS heaven with that editor, and can “live pre­view” your local copy IN THE SAME WINDOW.

    When this first got announced, I was all “meh”, but the more I think about it, the more I think “well, I live in Ter­minal, Safari and Text­mate all the time any­way, and this poten­tially uni­fies them all”. I like Text­mate a lot, but I’m going to give Coda a good go. If noth­ing else, it will reduce the sea of ter­minal and Safari win­dows clut­ter­ing my desktop. 

    Any­one know if the ref­er­ence sec­tion lets you import PDFs? I’ve got some Rails books I’d LOVE to pop in there. 

    Any­way, there’s a lot to this app — I think it might just fit if I work with it, instead of try­ing to work against it…

  9. Nick Toye said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 4:03 pm

    On the day when CSS Editor 2.5 has been released I find it a real wrench to move to another applic­a­tion.  Regard­less of Coda’s fea­tures, I love CSS Editor and can’t leave it I’m afraid.

  10. jakedahn said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm

    I think they did an amaz­ing job with the UI, but I really don’t like the text editor, so I think I’ll be stick­ing with my Textmate/CSSEdit2/iTerm combination.

  11. Francis Booth said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm

    I’m a big Panic fan it must be said, hav­ing evan­gel­ised Trans­mit for years now over the likes of the free altern­at­ives (Cyber­duck et al.).

    Hav­ing played with Coda for a couple of hours now, it does look like a great app. Whilst not revolu­tion­ary in its com­pon­ents (Transmit/SubEthaEdit/CSSedit/Terminal/etc.) the new-found syn­ergy is a refresh­ing look at what’s been a long-standing, bitty work­flow. Sim­ilar to what Aper­ture has tried versus Photoshop/iView. 

    How­ever, I do think that CSS edit pane suf­fers from being a bit over­whelm­ing. Gran­ted it’s very eleg­antly pixel-pushed, but that kind of inter­face (shared with CSSedit) really feels cum­ber­somely exhaust­ive of all the dif­fer­ent CSS prop­er­ties to me. I’m all for GUI but I still don’t think that the inter­face is as eleg­ant as the straight CSS in plain ASCII. Nor does it gently lean design­ers toward cod­ing styles using more subtle, abstrac­ted uses of CSS, like group­ing com­mon styl­ings under muti-selector declar­a­tions (i.e. comma delim­ited ones). 

    I’m not say­ing I know the answer, although I know it should look a lot more min­imal. It seems Panic had craf­ted a novice-friendly (iWeb/RapidWeaver) CSS inter­face, but the app is aimed squarely at people who have prob­ably been hand-coding CSS for ages now.

    Cri­tique over, it must be said that the rest of the app is pretty gor­geous though. I’m really lov­ing the Sites pane, with the little curl on the bot­tom of each of the screen­grabs. Plus the bottom-bar options in the Edit pane is deli­ciously min­imal and hence decept­ively power­ful. Lovely touches.

  12. Kelly said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 4:43 pm

    This looks like an amaz­ing applic­a­tion, and you can tell Panic has put in the extra time on this. I’m put­ting it through it’s paces today, and hope­ful it’s up to the Panic standard. 

    Colly: It looks like EE css tem­plates aren’t recog­nized as css, or I’m not get­ting this? This is a bum­mer, since I am doing almost all my work lately using EE.

  13. Colly said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Kelly: I have to admit I’m not actu­ally open­ing my EE tem­plates in it as raw text. All I’m doing is log­ging into my EE admin area in Coda’s site pre­view mode and using it as a browser to do EE admin and tem­plate tasks, and then using Coda as a text editor and FTP app in other tabs. So I’m simply drawstringing my browser-based work and my FTP, text edit­ing and image up/downloading into one application. 

    This is good because if I close Coda, then re-open that site with it, it remem­bers my pre­vi­ous tab set-up, so it opens files and so on, but also the “browser” win­dows I had opened in it too. Easy access to EE’s backend for taht site if I need it. 

    The big thing would be to actu­ally open and edit EE tem­plates by right-clicking or some­thing, a bit like how Safari Stand (or Saft, can never remem­ber) let you do into Text Mate. Some­body will do a plu­gin for that or crack it some­how, possibly…

  14. Chris Griffin said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    Jonathan Bar­rett,

    I did notice the ter­minal was built in. I guess the prob­lem is I’m par­tial to my cur­rent setup (Text­mate, iTerm (ter­minal), Fire­fox). I think the deal breaker for me is it’s using subethaedit and not text­mate. I really love text­mate and I don’t think the extra fea­tures Coda offers is enough for me to break away from it. 

    Nev­er­the­less, I should give it a go before I make that decision.

  15. Colly said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 5:10 pm

    Kelly: I have to admit I’m not actu­ally open­ing my EE tem­plates in it as raw text. All I’m doing is log­ging into my EE admin area in Coda’s site pre­view mode and using it as a browser to do EE admin and tem­plate tasks, and then using Coda as a text editor and FTP app in other tabs. So I’m simply drawstringing my browser-based work and my FTP, text edit­ing and image up/downloading into one application.

    This is good because if I close Coda, then re-open that site with it, it remem­bers my pre­vi­ous tab set-up, so it opens files and so on, but also the browser win­dows I had opened in it too. Easy access to EE’s backend for that site if I need it. 

    The big thing would be to actu­ally open and edit EE tem­plates by right-clicking or some­thing, a bit like how Safari Stand (or Saft, can never remem­ber) let you do into Text Mate. Some­body will do a plu­gin for that or crack it some­how, possibly.

  16. brad said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 5:36 pm

    It’s sad and in many ways amaz­ing that it has taken so long for some­thing like this to be avail­able for the Mac. Soft­ware that integ­rates site man­age­ment, FTP, page pre­view, and cod­ing in one seam­less pack­age has been around forever in Windows—I used Homes­ite for years and loved it, and it even included a good CSS editor (TopStyle).

  17. Jeff Croft said on: April 23rd, 2007 at 6:17 pm

    It’s sad and in many ways amaz­ing that it has taken so long for some­thing like this to be avail­able for the Mac.

    Stuff like this has been avail­able for Mac (skEdit comes to mind). It’s just that they haven’t been very pop­u­lar because they’ve either sucked or been way too fre­quently updated. The excite­ment here is largely due to the fact that every­one knows Panic is one of, if not the, best Mac developers anywhere. 

    Colly and Kelly: I’ve never used EE, so I don’t know it’s tem­plates work, but there is a set­ting in Coda to add cus­tom file exten­sions. So, you could, for example, say files end­ing in .ee should be treated as HTML, so they get HTML syn­tax col­or­ing and such. Since I don’t know much about EE, I don’t know if this helps, but I thought it was worth point­ing out. 

    But it still doesn’t have Text­Mate bundles or any sim­ilar extens­ib­il­ity. Dammit—I really need my Django tem­plate tab com­ple­tion and syn­tax coloring. :)

  18. Fredrik Wärnsberg said on: April 24th, 2007 at 1:41 am

    I like how both yours and the latest post over at http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/coda both men­tion how bad beta test­ers the two of you are :D

  19. Elliot Jay Stocks said on: April 24th, 2007 at 1:45 am

    Fran­cis and I were dis­cuss­ing Coda on the phone last night, and I totally agree with his point (above) about the app’s tar­get audience. 

    Impress­ive fea­tures list and wow-tastic GUI aside (and don’t get me wrong — I was wet­ting myself when I first opened it), I’m very con­fused about the CSS editor.

    Firstly, because — as Fran­cis says — why would any hand-coder (a very large chunk of Coda’s tar­get audi­ence) want to revert to a holding-your-hand-while-you-take-baby-steps graph­ical editor? Secondly, because why should a CSS file be treated dif­fer­ently from any other text-based file? Taken to its logical con­clu­sion, we should’ve seen tabs for PHP, ASP, JS, DAT, etc. This is the same reason I’ve never seen the point in CSSedit (as lovely as it looks) when Text­Mate is such a won­der­ful app. 

    Cri­ti­cism aside, Panic have come up with an abso­lutely won­der­ful app once again, and by and large it is hard to fault. I’ll cer­tainly be giv­ing it a proper chance all day today.

  20. Barney Carroll said on: April 24th, 2007 at 2:45 am

    I don’t really get it. From everything you say I should really be excited, but when I look at it prac­tic­ally, I can’t think of a reason (besides those cool but­tons at the top) to get it.

    • Trans­mit: Indis­pens­able, simple, eleg­ant, $40.

    • Coda: Elab­or­ate, comes with a dic­tion­ary, edits and saves text, super­flu­ous to my present work, $70. 

    Basic­ally, I use BBEdit and Trans­mit. It’s really not that dif­fi­cult. A fur­ther sep­ar­ate win­dow­for my Ter­minal keep­ing track of my SVN etc is really no extra hassle. Aside from the CSS dic­tion­ary (which, to be hon­est, is hardly use­ful), what am I actu­ally miss­ing out on for all that money?

  21. Gordon said on: April 24th, 2007 at 4:11 am

    I’m about to ‘switch’ and have been pani­cing (ged­dit) about find­ing a Mac replace­ment for HomeS­ite… looks like great tim­ing. If only my Mac­Book would hurry up and arrive!!

  22. Nate Klaiber said on: April 24th, 2007 at 7:08 am

    The former is just how I like my text apps; small, light­weight and lean on functionality

    I agree with this state­ment — I like things simple — pro­grams that get out of the way and let me do what I need (TextMate/Transmit). 

    I have tried out Coda, but (as oth­ers have said) my biggest qualm is lack of bundle sup­port. I have an array of cus­tom bundles I use for dif­fer­ent tasks that help me stream­line cer­tain projects. 

    I don’t know, I guess it seems like it’s tak­ing a step in another dir­ec­tion by adding things. I don’t think I would use the CSS editor (though it does look nice), I prob­ably wouldn’t use Pre­view as I already use sev­eral browsers for pre­views, and the books — well — I don’t know.

    All of those things make the applic­a­tion too busy for me. I don’t mind my setup with TextMate/Transmit/Terminal/Safari/FF — as each applic­a­tion does exactly what I need it to do. 

    So, I guess I am the only one out of the bunch that isn’t too excited (it feels like DW with a more mac-like inter­face). This isn’t a bad thing — just not my tastes I guess.

  23. Elliot Jay Stocks said on: April 24th, 2007 at 7:19 am

    I don’t think you’re the only one, Nate. The camps seem to be pretty divided on here and on Jon Hicks’ post.

    I’ve also writ­ten a fairly crit­ical post that fol­lows up on the com­ment I left above, if you’re interested.

  24. Graham Sanders said on: April 24th, 2007 at 2:13 pm

    Boy does Jon Hicks like his leaves icons ;)

  25. Simon Clayson said on: April 25th, 2007 at 6:47 am

    Have any of you EE gang mem­bers tried this yet?

    Just to con­fuse mat­ters for me, CCS Edit gets major upgrade as well. We’re being spoilt.

  26. Kelly said on: April 25th, 2007 at 7:18 am

    Simon, I just tried it last even­ing, and it works a treat. May be the tip­ping point towards a pur­chase for me.

  27. Colly said on: April 25th, 2007 at 7:23 am

    Kelly: Yeah, I’m lov­ing work­ing on my EE sites using this — a win­dow­for each that is always set up and ready for action with my admin tabs etc. 

    Clayson: Yeah, I read that post, but I don’t save EE tem­plates as files — might be worth a try though…

  28. Simon Clayson said on: April 25th, 2007 at 7:47 am

    Kelly: Yes the tip­ping point for me. Pos­sibly. I’m going to try it later. 

    Colly: Don’t save tem­plates as files? Thats hard core. Me, I need all my bits of code col­oured like a bad trip in 1968. 

    The Text­mate EE bundle. Now if this was in Coda… 

    Gra­ham: Did Mr Hicks do this logo or is it a product of The Icon­fact­ory? The qual­ity of icon always (per­haps) seems to be a sig­ni­fier of the qual­ity of the app. Either way, it’s nice. 

    I can’t spell spoilt either.

  29. Tim Swan said on: April 25th, 2007 at 10:34 am

    I under­stand that the lack of Sub­ver­sion may be a showstop­per for many, but all of the com­ments about the lack of fea­tures in the text editor seem to be a little off. It’s pretty simple to choose a file, control-click it and then choose any external editor that you’d like to. Edit the doc­u­mentin BBEdit, Text­Mate, Smul­tron, etc. and then save and close it. Then just upload the changed file. 

    Addi­tion­ally, though the Clips fea­ture isn’t as power­ful as Bundles, it is pos­sible to cre­ate cus­tom clips and set a key trig­ger, repla­cing at least a part of TextMate’s bundle feature. 

    Still on the fence about this one, but I’m lean­ing toward adding it to my toolkit as the open-all-the-time, general-purpose web tool.

  30. Julien said on: April 27th, 2007 at 6:39 am

    Hi !

    I’ve just down­loaded it and I must con­fess : “ the panic team did a great job”.

    Con­cern­ing rails, wahou ! build-in ter­minal, code com­ple­tion … I mean … Ruby code com­ple­tion but also .. rails code com­ple­tion and css code com­ple­tion and .. etc etc … 

    I also like the “clips” win­dows :  You can embed­ded full RoR lay­out ( actu­ally any text) save it as clip and just drag-and-drop a clip to a doc­u­ment… that’s a really nice feature.

    Moreover it looks very nice. 

    Great job !

  31. scott said on: April 27th, 2007 at 10:20 am

    I use CSS editor 2.5 and i think this is the best pro­gram for their own class.

  32. Keeran said on: April 29th, 2007 at 1:00 pm

    I can’t remem­ber where I saw this linked ori­gin­ally, but it cer­tainly caught my eye. Unfor­tu­nately we haven’t used FTP for our sites for years — if it had SVN+SSH (or any other VC) integ­ra­tion it would be on our pur­chase list I think :) 

    (once I con­vert every­one to Macs anyways;)

    k

  33. Ben said on: April 30th, 2007 at 7:38 am

    I’ve down­loaded it and am mer­rily Coda’ing away. I agree this does appear to be a nicely thought out app with a far bet­ter workflow. 

    I think amongst its best/most wel­come fea­ture is its light­weight overhead. 

    Keep us pos­ted on how you get on with it though.

  34. Rory said on: May 2nd, 2007 at 4:34 am

    Excuse me if this is a naive ques­tion, but I noticed nobody men­tioned Dream­weaver as an altern­at­ive — everyone’s talk­ing about Ter­minal and Text­Mate and a bunch of others.

    Maybe I’m miss­ing the point, or maybe Dream­weaver is just totally uncool, but can somone tell me why Coda — or these com­bin­a­tions of other apps — is better?

  35. julien said on: May 6th, 2007 at 4:24 pm

    Could someone explain to me why should we code in MacOS con­sid­er­ing that we need (depend­ing on your cli­ents) to test in IE? Oth­er­wise, it seems like the per­fect os to cre­ate… but it is still the mil­lions of IE user to sat­isfy. :(

    Is there an easy/fast solu­tion to test mul­tiple ver­sions of IE on a mac? 

    (I code in win­dows and when I need to get a khtml pre­view I go on swift.) 

    thanks!

  36. Al said on: May 10th, 2007 at 1:20 pm

    That’s great editor, last time I use just this one and I like it very much!

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