Filed under: Software, Internet Tools
Panic releases Coda web editor
The folks at Panic are celebrating the tenth anniversary of their incorporation today with what developer Steven recently called "...our biggest, most ambitious new software launch of all time." Today, we can tell you that project is Coda.It's being billed as "One-window web development," and from what we can tell, it looks pretty awesome. I only played with the demo briefly, so there's obviously a lot more to this app then you'll find here (Steven's blog is a good place to go for the full scoop).
First of all, the UI is beautiful. When first launched, Coda offers to import your Transmit favorites, which it did perfectly for me. It then "taped" each project if found in my copy of Transmit to the main window. To work on a project, just double click it and it "flips" into view. One more click logs into the project's remote files and displays them in the left hand sidebar. Select any file to begin working on it. Super easy and fast.
One more thing that needs to be mentioned, and I'm only scratching the surface here, is the "Books" feature. One click and you're brought to a virtual bookshelf that houses volumes on HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP. Click any book to begin "reading" it, and quickly jump to any topic you are particularly interested in just by clicking a keyword. You can also order hardcopy versions of any of the books.
Coda retails for $99 (lower introductory rates are available for now) and requires 10.4 or later. Now if you'll excuse me, I really want to stop typing and return to playing with Coda.
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Peter said 2:38PM on 4-23-2007
Needs code collapsing, then im sold.
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Pierce said 2:39PM on 4-23-2007
Wow, this looks like a really useful App. Can't wait to try it out!
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Tim Kimberl said 2:47PM on 4-23-2007
Was a bit pricey but I bought it, app fits my coding style perfectly. My only complaints...
- Crappy icon, looks bad in my dock.
- You pretty much have to leave the toolbar visible or you lose functionality.
Other than that, does everything pretty well.
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Graham Lampa said 2:54PM on 4-23-2007
Um, this is nice and all, but since most sites are driven using some sort of blog technology (Wordpress, Movable Type, etc.) this new program from Panic seems pretty useless (to me, at least). Since there are well documented APIs for these systems, can't we have some sort of interface with them?
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Nick said 2:56PM on 4-23-2007
Is this Transmit, CSSEdit and SubEthaEdit all brought together in a single app ?
The CSS editor sure looks like CSSEdit from a quick glance and they state that they are using SubEthaEdit's engine.
$99 / $79 intro if you don't own Transmit, $69 if you already own Transmit, but what if you also own CSSEdit and SubEthaEdit which it replaces / combines.
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Brady J. Frey said 3:22PM on 4-23-2007
"Um, this is nice and all, but since most sites are driven using some sort of blog technology (Wordpress, Movable Type, etc.) this new program from Panic seems pretty useless (to me, at least). Since there are well documented APIs for these systems, can't we have some sort of interface with them?"
Useless to you, but not to people who develop these types of engines... or people who customize these engines like me. I haven't demoed - but what you're after is something that customizes with the blog engine admin. That's not what this is for, it's for us who want to create our own themes, hack the guts, create plugins... and not just for blogs, for our own creations as well, etc.
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Graham Lampa said 4:21PM on 4-23-2007
Of course I want to create my own themes. I don't just want a blog interface... but I'm talking about some form of integration with, say, Movable Type's templating system or WordPress's themes. I want to be able to open my Wordpress theme's main.php file, hit preview, and see an actual preview of what that page would look like, not an SQL error!
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Shaun said 4:01PM on 4-23-2007
I'm still stuck on the website... Talk about a sexy website!
Cool product too btw :)
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stealth43 said 4:07PM on 4-23-2007
This seems really well designed, however it isnt allowing preview in files that use includes to reference the css. Which sucks. If I reference the stylesheet in page, it doesnt have a problem...
evaD
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jerome said 4:26PM on 4-23-2007
Quite the sexy application, if we all used macs at my work where we build web sites (which includes tons of statically built sites along with dynamic web apps tied in) we would use this instead of Dreamweaver. Beautiful
The CSS editing looks kinda like CSSEdit, but not nearly as advanced & powerful as CSSEdit, specially recently released 2.5 which has some crazy awesome stuff
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powermac99 said 4:31PM on 4-23-2007
I can't put into words how happy this program makes me. Thank you, Panic.
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BillSaysThis said 4:46PM on 4-23-2007
There's no mention of this on the website that I saw, so I wonder if it supports SVN integration for those of us who can't edit directly (or wouldn't if we could).
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Tice said 5:18PM on 4-23-2007
Tried it and deleted it. As much as I love Transmit (and look forward for the faster engine) - Coda just isn't my app. No PHP preview, no snippits (or "clips" like links, images, etc.), no directories and linked files, bad syntax coloring (default), import of Transmit favs ask for each (!!) to allow, main tools are to much clicks away, and so on...
I stay with BBEdit or TextWrangler (free).
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Gareth said 5:25PM on 4-23-2007
Well, I've just bought myself a copy, which means it will be on MacZot tomorrow, and I will have also won it in NextZot.
Still, from what I've seen, this moght even replace textmate as my site development tool of choice.
I'm still not sure how it handles working on development and live servers, though
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Jimmy said 5:59PM on 4-23-2007
I've been using this for the last couple hours on SmallDog.com AND WOW...I absolutely love it, I don't think I've found anything that I dislike about this application at all. Now I just need to convince my manager to purchase me a full copy! :)
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Mo said 6:07PM on 4-23-2007
It doesn't handle locally-hosted sites too well, unfortunately, other than that it's fantastic.
The way we work is that local machines (notably the Macs) run an installation of Apache/MySQL/PHP with a complete checkout from the Subversion repository of the site you might be working on. Changes are committed back, and a script is run to transfer changes from the development branch to the ‘staging’ branch (which the test site is checked out from, allowing clients to preview changes). Once changes have been signed off, another script copies the changes from the staging branch to the live branch, and the live site gets updated from the repository. Nice and easy.
Except… Coda doesn't want to play nice with my local web server, which is a shame. Feature request #1: a way to say ‘actually, I run Apache on this machine, the local path is the same as the root URL I gave you, everything else is relative to it’, and whenever I preview a file, it navigate the built-in browser to that URL instead of the file:/// URL of the source file.
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Dan said 7:59PM on 4-23-2007
"Feature request #1: a way to say ‘actually, I run Apache on this machine, the local path is the same as the root URL I gave you, everything else is relative to it’, and whenever I preview a file, it navigate the built-in browser to that URL instead of the file:/// URL of the source file."
I'll second this request. Right now you can trick Coda by previewing the file and then typing the localhost address (folks wanting to preview php locally this is how you do it), but that's kind of annoying as everytime you preview it you have to refresh the page manually. The ability to set a local root URL would be awesome.
My other gripe is that the terminal doesn't work quite as well as it should. It also doesn't always connect but I suspect that's due to how I have ssh setup (running several sessions over the same TCP connection, I suspect Coda doesn't recognize the socket. Transmit sometimes has problems with this too.) There's a workaround for this too, login to the local shell in coda and the run ssh to your desired server.
Other than that I really like this program. Definitely very helpful to work on my sites that don't reside on my local computer at all for sure, and it just needs some tweaks to make working with locally hosted sites a better experience.
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michel said 8:59PM on 4-23-2007
wow, wonderful 1.0 version
I'm sure 2.0 will add local apache/php support (they could even embed a php runtime to smooth that)
and of course CSS subtlety and others things
but for a 1.0 I LOVE it.
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chris said 10:57PM on 4-23-2007
It's a great start. Second to dan's comments. Why no local root folder seems weird. It's an extra step to preview local files over http...
Will use it for the next two weeks and decide. Love transmit.
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dunk said 9:30PM on 4-23-2007
for those of you wanting localhost support and/or php/sql support in the preview, i suggest downloading a copy of MAMP and enabling FTP through sharing preferences. works perfectly with coda. here are the settings (once you have MAMP installed, assuming you use the default settings)
root url: http://localhost:8888
remote root: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/[your site name/folder]
local root: /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/[your site name/folder]
server: X.X.X.X (you can find out specifically under the sharing prefs what your internal IP address is)
user name: [the user name you login in to your computer with]
password: [password you login to your computer with
port: 21
protocol: ftp (sftp might work, haven't tried) [default coda setting]
list encoding: western (iso latin 1) [default coda setting]
use passive mode for data transfer (checked) [default coda setting]
prompt for password when connection (un-checked) [default coda setting]
i didn't bother setting up ssh terminal access. seemed a bit pointless. but do all that and php/mysql sites work like a charm locally.
nice little app, if they could integrate some AJAX libraries like aptana does, it'd be even better.
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