Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Coda from Panic. Meh.

Coda is a new integrated web development application from the fine folks at Panic. I love their previous product, Transmit—so why don’t I give a whit for Coda?

First - I don’t like reviews on developer apps. Every developer works differently, as is evident in the code they write. It’s a personal experience that is hard to funnel into prescribed procedures, so it may well be that Coda just doesn’t work for me. Or maybe I need to consider applying some change to my existing style (yeah, right) but if you develop web sites, you do need to download it and give it a try.

I’ve been a user of Dreamweaver since version 1.0 was shown to a group of us at the Denver (D)TC. I don’t use it much except on the PC at work because on the Mac at home I can do better work with BBEdit and CSSedit. (Discolsure: I’ve been a betatester for CSSEdit from MacRabbit).

I want to like Coda, at least half as much as I liked Transmit. If that were true, this would have been a rave review, but Coda suffers from v1.0-itis in it’s current form. You can read everywhere reviews on Coda and what it’s like.

Let me touch on what I dislike:

  • Speed: It’s a bit pokey on a 1.67Mhz Powerbook, so I await the 1.1 version for tweaks.
  • Keyboard commands: Why, oh why do people think I want to use the mouse? Some developers prefer keyboard equivs. When beta testing version 2 of CSSEdit, I worked with the developer to implement OPT-TAB vertically through the editors and CMD-OPT up and down through the editor palette.
  • The CSS environment is oversized (compared to CSSEdit), the fonts are too large, lots of dead area in the CSS view - just not an efficient use of space on a powerbook.
  • No site-wide serch? Sorry?? BBedit or Jedit rules here…
  • Splitting the views is a cool idea, but only horizontally or vertically - not a combination of the two, which would allow a great deal more flexibility when it comes to displays of different sizes.
  • CSS3 elements are mixed-in with the CSS2 elements - if you were new to CSS, you might beat your head against a wall when your shadows don’t work on Firefox but do in Safari.  There should be some marking - even an asterisk.
  • The lack of keyboard launch for other browsers. OPT-B for preview in Safari? Isn’t that already internal? What about Firefox? (What I would REALLY like would be some means to target IE in Parallels. But first I’ll need a Intel powerbook…sigh.)

    • What do I like? Glad you asked:

  • Transmit integration. Schnappy!
  • CSS3 support
  • Integrated manuals (although I’d like it more if they were available offline - doesn’t anyone commute and code?)
  • Bonjour-enabled cooperative environment. It’s good to see someone other than SubEthaEdit take advantage of this.

    • It’s a good 1.0 release (read: it hasn’t crashed and taken my work with it) but I’m not writing checks quite yet. I don’t see how reaching for a mouse and clicking is faster than CMD-tabbing to another application, so any benefits just seem negated. If I could keep my fingers on the keyboard and alt/cmd-tab everywhere, I’d be happy with Coda indeed.

     

    Posted by Admin on 04/25 at 01:30 AM
    Posted in: IT notes  
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    Monday, April 02, 2007

    Today was the first day of school…

    For those keeping score, I’ve moved from Media Plaza to Ilse Media, in Amsterdam.

    Ilse Media positions itself as the Dutch Google, and it’s a good technical company in that regard. These are smart people here - fingers-crossed, I’m looking to jump in and do what I do best…

    Posted by Admin on 04/02 at 02:41 PM
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