Rating: 4.5/5

General Info:  New from Panic, a longtime Mac software company now 10 years old, is Coda. Coda is a groundbreaking app for web developers. What Coda does differently is that it has one multi-tabbed window for all of your work. This helps keep you focused on the task at hand as well as saves your time by not switching between apps. Coda combines all of the tools you need to make a website in one window, except Photoshop. The tools are quite a nice combination that together make Coda worth significantly more than it’s current price of $79, and $99 after a week or so. Coda starts out as an iPhoto type interface for organizing websites. As soon as you click the site you want to work on, your workspace appears. You can make tabs filled with text editors, a live preview, a GUI for editing CSS, Terminal sessions, and  reference books. All of the workspaces can be split in two directions and may contain the previously stated items.
The text editor is very advanced, featuring collaboritive sharing licensed from the makers of SubEthaEdit. All of the usual languages are supported and included niceties like syntax completion. Also included are macro-like “Clips”, hints, and validation. Where Coda is most behind currently is it’s text editor, mainly due to the sheer power of TextMate, BBEdit, and others. Still, the text editor is powerful enough for me.
Located directly in the sidebar is one of the fastest FTP clients for Mac. Two simple tabs allow switching between local and remote directories. One of the more innovative features of Coda is “Books”. “Books” is essentially a built-in, ebook reference library for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and more to come (according to Panic).
Just the 1.0 version of Coda is amazing and Panic continually alludes to massive, and free, improvements in the works. Coda has a few bugs and is missing a few things, like scriptability, but is a solution all web designers should at least try. Most of all, Coda is fun to use; so much so that this entire review was written in Coda collaboratively, between PhoeniX42 and EDIT-XTREEM.

Retail Price: $79 introductory price, $99 later

Site: https://www.panic.com/coda/

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Code, New Software, Reviews, Utilities, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.