Coda
So, Coda then. The new integrated web development environment for the Mac from Panic. It’s a text editor, FTP client, CSS editor, terminal and a set of teaching books all within one application. Which in theory sounds great, and the UI is full of excellent touches, but the problem with the kitchen sink approach is that nothing really gets the spit and polish it really deserves.
The text editor has promise (it has tabs!) but lacks something as simple as proper auto-indenting (which means, as I’ve said before, that a new line after an opening brace indents the next line and a closing brace on a line on it’s own automatically has it’s indent decreased). This alone makes it difficult for me to use. The books seem pointless, they’re online and I can’t add my own. The terminal is like the normal Mac terminal, pretty basic. The CSS editor is confusing and doesn’t seem to display according to the preferences I set. The FTP part does pretty much what you’d expect, but still forces me to treat everything like a project.
If the text editor did the basics, or it didn’t quite lock me into the site/project method of working, then this would be more than a neat idea with a clean interface. But as it stands, it’s no more usable than Editplus via Parallels. Maybe after another 6 months of updates and upgrades.
