I’m probably the last person who is going to write about Coda’s release to actually do it. I think it had to do with the fact that I was lazy/busy at work, and I wanted to let the dust settle a bit before i put my thoughts down. First off, Coda is a web design/development app released by the same guys who created Transmit, easily the best FTP app for the Mac. Every app I’ve ever seen from these guys has an insane amount of polish and thought put into every single feature and pixel that the app takes up. In my mind, they really embody what every small Mac developer should be. Coda was released about two months ago now, filling in the gap between Adobe’s Dreamweaver and a leaner text-editor like skEdit or Textmate. When you create a ’site’ (basically whatever website you’re working on), you select it’s location on your local machine, and set up it’s remote location as well.

Like other design/development apps that do site management, this makes uploading changes a snap. Another great thing that Coda does is it keeps track of what you have changed since your last upload and ‘marks them for publish’. So, if you change 10 files in your site, Coda remembers those files were changed, and when you tell the app to publish the changed files, it quickly uploads those files to the correct location on the server. Very nice.

Of course, none of this would matter if Coda wasn’t a world-class text-editor. It’s got some warts, but overall it’s a great (x)html/php/actionscript/css editor. All of the things you’re used to: code completion, syntax highlighting, code balancing, find/replace, code hints, and so much more are included and certainly speed up your workflow.

The find/replace they have implemented is absolutely stellar as well. It allows you to insert wildcards so you can replace large portions of code based on criteria such as location or which tag is surrounding it. The example from the site sums it up: Want to swap the width and height tags in all of your images It’s as simple as searching for and replacing it with That’s it: Coda does the rest. Drag the tokens where you need them, and use as many as you want. (Hard core users can still use regular expressions directly.) Very cool.

Coda also leverages the Webkit (safari’s rendering engine) built into OS X to give live previews of the pages as you edit the code. As nice as it is, this is the area I think needs the most improvement. I’d really like to see a WYSIWYG-type editor instead of a simple rendering of your page.

Also, the way it has to refresh on every change you make can be annoying. And finally, the inspector (a magnifying glass that, when you use it, will show you which DOM elements surround any element you click on) should be more consistent. Clicking on some elements will show you the exact part of the source you are working with, and other times it does not.

Still, it’s really nice to be able to quickly preview the pages you’re working on in Safari instead of saving the changes to a text file, alt tabbing to safari, pressing refresh, and then going back to the text editor. Coda also comes with a visual CSS editor that is very nice, but I rarely use it. I’m honestly faster hand-coding the CSS 99 of the time. But it looks very slick, and the few times I have used it, it has saved me a lot of time (for example, you can use the color chooser to choose a border color instead of looking the hex value up). There is also built-in terminal access, and a very cool site manager that shows thumbnails of all the sites you are working with.

Overall, a very complete and useful package. Will this supplant my normal toolkit of Dreamweaver, Camino/Safari, TextMate, and Transmit I’m not sure yet – right now, I use it about 50 of the time at work – but I really do enjoy using the app more than TextMate or Dreamweaver. I’m just so damn fast in TextMate, and frankly that’s what it’s all about.

I’m not alone in loving Coda though, as it recently won an Apple Design Award for best user interface. The Panic guys really are top-notch developers who listen to their customers and turn out best-in-class software – in the past 2 months, they have turned out 3 updates to Coda, all of which have added new, requested features or new behavior. And I’m sure by the time Coda 2.0 is out, this software will be one of the best, if not the best, web development programs out there.