I have been using Panic Software‘s excellent OS X FTP client, Transmit, for about two years now. The Mac software maker recently released Coda, advertised as One Window Web Development for Mac OS X. The software has already won an Apple Design Award for Best Mac OS X User Experience, and it has been getting attention from a lot of web developers, if the buzz on the blog scene is any indication.

After my positive experiences with some of Panic’s other products, namely Transmit and Desktastic, I was interested to see what Coda would offer. Fortunately, it is available to download for a free two week trial. I used the trial period to give it a shot, and found it comfortable to use, beautifully designed, and fairly fully featured. Though there are several issues which remain for me (see below), the overall experience of the product convinced me to lay out the $69.95 USD (Transmit owner price) to have it for my own. What follows is an (incomplete) rundown of the features, limitations, and bugs that I’ve experienced so far, for anyone else interested in switching to the product.

* As I have used TextMate and Eclipse almost exclusively for web development for the past year, many of my gripes with Coda address features found in those products which are missing or, to my mind, not properly implemented here. However, Coda offers a more intuitive, streamlined interface than either of these environments, and so naturally there are trade-offs.

Best Features

• Built-in Page Preview in Safari, and a drop-down menu to view the page in the browser of your choice (this list is automatically populated with browsers installed on your system). The page Preview can also be viewed in a split mode, with your code and page visible simultaneously (all in one window, of course).
• Inline validation of XHTML and CSS.

  

• Clips is a floating panel which allows quick access to common code snippets to be inserted into your code. Comes populated with common (X)HTML snippets like DOCTYPE declarations and page structure, as well as Lorem Ipsum text. Also allows easy addition of custom Clips.

  

• Built-in Terminal. Very handy!
• Symbols/Functions Navigator, akin to that in Eclipse, a more fully functioned IDE.

  

• Simultaneous Local/Remote viewing of sites, with built-in Transmit FTP. Makes managing local and live copies of files intuitive.
• Sites view. Great GUI for the various remote sites you have to manage on a daily basis.

  

• Overall design excellence. The Panic guys are perfectionists, and their attention to detail really pays off in all the little touches that raise this application head-and-shoulders above the other options in terms of look and feel.

Limitations

• No code block folding/toggling. This is a simple but major feature to leave out. I use this constantly in TextMate, especially when editing XML documents.
• Cannot select and set the case (Upper, Lower, Camel) of a piece of text, as in TextMate.
• No Find & Replace in Project (directory) feature (again, like in TextMate).
• Site images in Sites view don’t display Flash content.
• Can’t arrange order of open tabs (files). (Addressed in V.1.0.3)
• Can’t move around views/perspectives. In Eclipse, I’m able to arrange my window as I would like, and even the minimal interface of TextMate allows me to set the directory structure drawer to open on the left or right. In Coda, the default view is your only option. As gorgeous as it is, some flexibility would be nice!
  

  Panic responded with the following:
  “You’re right, the File Browser can only be on the left of the screen, though you can hide it by selecting Hide File Browser from the View menu. Just about everything else about the layout is customizable through the use of splits, though. I like having my CSS in an editor on the left, and a preview of my HTML on the right. Vertical splits are great!”

  This is true, although I meant the ability to move around the various inspectors/navigators. For example, the Find and Replace interface, the Functions viewer, the local and remote site navigators, etc. These are not customizable, in terms of position. However, as I mentioned, the default layout and design of these features is excellent, and I’d rather have one well-configured layout than unlimited options to customize.

• Clicking twice on a file in the file navigator on the left does not allow Renaming (as any Mac user would expect). (Addressed in V.1.0.3)

Bugs!

• Undo continually fails. Several undo’s will work, then suddenly stop. The Release Notes for the most recent version state that this has been addressed, but I continue to experience this issue, and it is by far the most frustrating bug of the bunch.
• Block comment feature does not recognize in-head stylesheets (uses HTML comments rather than CSS comments). Likewise with Embedded Ruby – tries to comment out HTML tags with Ruby comments (#).
• Dual-monitoring: didn’t recognize to bring my Clips panel back onto my laptop monitor after unplugging my external monitor. I wasn’t able to get the panel back until I restarted Coda.
• Syntax colouring did not turn on automatically after saving a file as CSS. Had to close and re-open to get colouring. Also, mixed files, and less common file types, are often coloured incorrectly, or not at all.
  

  Panic responded with the following:
  “You can change the syntax mode from the Text menu, or from the action menu at the bottom of the editor pane. As for your less common file extensions, you can set up custom syntax modes in the Preferences, under Editor.”

• General crashes have become less common since upgrading to V.1.0.3, but there are still application crashes during regular tasks. Apple-tabbing to other applications and back to Coda seems to be particularly problematic.

The limitations and bugs I’ve mentioned are not insignificant, but Panic has an excellent track record of constant improvement of their products. It’s clear that they invest more than the standard effort to make their products stand out, and I think that Coda is already very impressive, even this early in its lifecycle. Thanks for a great tool guys!

After sending Panic a link to this article, I received a prompt reply from Tim at the company responding to several of the issues I mentioned (included in-line, above), and asking for more details on the bugs I outlined. Thanks for caring!