Panic released Coda today, stealing some of the thunder from macrabbit’s CSSEdit 2.5, also released today. CSSEdit, along with Transmit and skEdit, have been my preferred trio of development apps, so how does Panic’s Coda—an all-in-one FTP client, text editor, preview browser, css editor, terminal, and reference library—stack up?
I’ve been playing with it for the better part of the afternoon and so far, Coda has prompted gasps of both pleasure and frustration. The interface is polished and clean, with flowing effects (like site icons that scale up and flip over to reveal a new document or the site settings), and a refreshing attention to details. As a package, Coda is impressive—almost perfect—but when you start using it, you can’t help feeling it falls just a little short. It makes you long for 1.1 or 2.0, or however long it will take to fill out the feature set just a tad.
As an FTP client, Coda isn’t designed to replace Transmit, condensing the file browser to a sidebar. But Coda uses Panic’s new Transmit Turbo engine, making file transfers noticeably faster. Unfortunately, there’s no audio feedback for when a transfer is complete. The transcript window seems like an orphan floating all by itself; I wondered why it wasn’t a drawer, as it is in Transmit.
The text editor is easy to use, with most of the features you’d expect: syntax coloring, line numbering and auto completion. Using the Subetha Engine, you can code collaboratively. Coda uses Grep for search and replace, but unless I’m missing something, there’s no way to search within all the files in a folder, something I’ve come to rely on in skEdit. And the Clips palette, which lets you store snippets, doesn’t allow you to organize them into folders as you can with skEdit. If you have more than a handful of clips, using the palette can be cumbersome (you can use keyboard shortcuts to insert them, though).
You can split any pane to compare multiple views in a single window (for example, editing an HTML file and previewing it at the same time), but if you split a pane while editing a file and open another file, you have to split the pane again. It would be great if there were a preference so that anytime you opened a text file you would also get a browser preview.
The weakest link in Coda is the CSS editor. It seems almost modeled on CSSEdit, with a similar look: enter styles on the left and edit them on the right. There are two editing modes: a visual mode with controls similar to CSSEdit, and a text mode which displays forms where you can enter values for any properties. You can also split the CSS pane and edit the CSS directly in a text window. There are two problems with this: first, the area where you enter the selectors isn’t resizable, so even if you want to use the visual or “text” editor, you’re likely to feel cramped. Second, if you want the best of both worlds, using the CSS editor to remind you of the available properties and still editing the text manually, the split pane approach is kind of a kludge. CSSEdit is clearly superior here.
Coda also includes a terminal, something I don’t use much, and a Books pane that offers The Web Programmer’s Desk Reference, which covers HTML, CSS and Javascript, all reformated for easy reading. You’ll also find a PHP reference. They hope to add more books. This is actually a great idea. Let’s hope they do add to this.
I’m not ready to say that working in Coda and switching back from pane to pane, or arranging and rearranging panes to suit me, is any better than switching from one application to another. When I first logged on to Panic’s site this morning, I had my credit card in hand, but I waited to pull the trigger. I did just buy it, but more as a leap of faith that it will grow on me or get better in the next version. Oh, and they had a special offer for $69 for Transmit 3 owners.
Here’s one equation: Transmit ($29.95) + CSSEdit ($29.95) + skEdit ($24.95) = $84.85. Coda is $99, or $89 if you already own Transmit 3.
Bottom Line: If you’re just starting out, buying Coda is a no brainer. But if you have your favorite apps in place, Coda may or may not be worth it for you.
From: Panic
Price: $99, $89 if you already own Transmit 3.
Platform: Macintosh
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11 Comments
Add a WYSIWYG HTML editor and FTP syncing, and Coda will replace several icons in my Dock. Without those features, I still need to have Dreamweaver and Transmit open when working on my site.
I think Coda falls a little short of perfection (and everyone who’s interested has their list of what’s missing), but I’ve already taken Transmit and skEdit out of my Dock. I’m not ready to let go of CSSEdit yet. Oh, and I still use my Transmit Droplets. I don’t think Panic will beef up the FTP client in Coda too much, though.
Just playing around with it, preview doesn’t work when working with PHP files and includes. Or maybe I need to spend more than 3 seconds using it, eh?
Good first attempt, I love the direction it’s going.
You can preview, but you have to refresh the window manually. Not ideal.
Yeah, the site I’m testing uses includes for header, footer, etc. I’m not getting it to work in this case.
Chino, I’ve found that I can test my WordPress site by opening the site manually in a split window, then manually refreshing it after making changes. It won’t update changes automatically, but it should refresh. Of course, if the page you’re working on is hosted remotely, you have to be editing the remote pages and if you’re editing local pages, you have to be previewing them through localhost.
Ah, good point.
As I work with Coda more, I’m having troubles uploading lately where Transmit has no troubles at all with the same files going to the same directory.
Chino, if you’re having problems with Coda, but not Transmit, the problem is likely with your host. I have the problem with Media Temple, but not AN Hosting. I’m not real clear technically why this happens, but it has something to do with the way the server at MT opens a connection for each open file. After I’ve edited a few files, MT says there are too many open connections and won’t save anymore. It’s a pain, but when I work on my MT hosted sites, I have to open them from Transmit.
I use Media Temple, too and have had many FTP issues since they switched to the new grid-servers system.
The odd thing is that it almost seems as those this issue with Coda is new, like only in the past couple of weeks.
I’ve only been with Media Temple for a few weeks, but they may have changed something in the way the servers work. I have no problems using Coda with AN Hosting, so I don’t think it’s a problem with the software. MT explained the reason to me, but I frankly didn’t pay very close attention. I was too frustrated. It’s also frustrating that neither MT nor Panic have forums, so it isn’t easy to figure problems like this out. I had to call MT twice. The first time the person said they would change some settings on my account, which did nothing.
Yeah,I had many support tickets open with MT about FTP. I used to be able to open files directly from my server and edit and save but they suggested that I need to pull them down, edit, save, and upload again which seems ridiculous sometimes. I didn’t have this problem before with older system but I can see how this would impact Coda since it’s an open connection while editing.
Coda support seems minimal, as well which is surprising. I would like to see a support forum for it, too.