Panic software

Nothing brightens up a Saturday morning hangover like toys I’m not supposed to have in my inbox. An anonymous tipster (thanks Mike!) dished me a copy of Panic Software’s new developer workflow application Coda today. If you remember I was just a little bit hot and bothered about this yesterday. The app is supposed to officially debut Monday but I don’t see why I can’t give you guys my own first impressions with a full on exclusive review.

I do web development pretty much every day and have never been a real fan of the all inclusive, live editing types of tools. Honestly tools like Dreamweaver really makes me cringe. So like many others I normally have a separate application for text editing, FTP, shell, and of course a few browsers open. I have to tell you, I’ve taken the red pill now and doing away with all of these separate tools actually seems possible with Coda.

So in case you haven’t already guessed, from within Coda you can use FTP, terminal, preview, a CSS editor, and of course live edit your remote files on the fly. When I first launched Coda it sucked in all of my details from Transmit (another Panic app) with a quick import. From there I was met with a jaw droppingly gorgeous live preview of my website, where I could enter my remote/local, FTP, and shell details.

Enter your details

I guarantee you will be impressed by the user interface in Coda. I never used to be impressed by jazzy special effects, simplicity, and elegance in my applications, but Panic really delivers on this front. If this type of thing gives you wood, prepare to be really dazzled when working with this tool.

But the real bread and butter of an app like this is its live editing feature. Some of the other workflow apps I’ve used really don’t handle the remote editing of files that elegantly. When you live in Bangkok and your working on servers in the US, trust me, you will feel the latency. After working with Coda all day doing just this type of work, I can say I am very satisfied, and even a bit surprised. As with Transmit a connection loss is transparent to the user, meaning you never know you got disconnected.

Which brings me to the built in editor. For me this is really the deal maker. One of the problems I have had switching to a Mac is the editors on OS X. They aren’t bad, but they aren’t great either. Having said that, I think the guys at Panic are off to a really great start with their own editor. All of the usual languages are supported and styled appropriately including: CSS, HTML, Javascript, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, SQL, XML, and straight text.