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Coda from Panic. Meh.

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

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   • Comments (0) • Permalink

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