Filed under: Software, Beta Beat, Developer
Beta Beat: MacRabbit's Espresso released as public beta
Espresso, the highly-anticipated web design and development platform from MacRabbit (creators of CSSEdit), has been released as a public beta (originally predicted for late November). It's not finished (that's why it's called beta, silly), but it's far more complete than what we've seen thus far. The auto-completion capabilities of the editor are well-developed, support for HTML, XML, CSS and Javascript is included, and the live preview is working nicely. The array of available Sugars, as the extension packages are called, is frequently being added to by users, and support for additional languages is already available. A few themes, some ported from TextMate, can also be found on the wiki.
Web developers who have used CSSEdit are familiar with the simple interface which belies many powerful features. You can expect the same from Espresso. Coda users will be interested as well; when Espresso is feature-complete, you can expect a TUAW-style head-to-head comparison of the two. Personally, I'm a die-hard TextMate user, which any of the TUAW crew can attest to. I always have trouble getting into new editors, no matter how rich their feature set may be. I stopped editing CSS in TextMate when CSSEdit came out, though; there's just no comparison. Knowing CSSEdit the way I do, Espresso may be the platform which finally pulls some of my TextMate loyalty away ... at least for web design.
You can grab the time-limited (30 days) beta from MacRabbit's site. If you're a developer, make sure you check out the wiki. For me, the most appealing aspect of Espresso is its extensibility, and a look through the SDK should pique the interest of any code-sligner.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
required said 12:10PM on 12-30-2008
Sun may spot brand infringement here...well they should, but they probably won't. In my opinion this developer should just do the right thing and ditch their cup of java angle. Perhaps revise as "MacRabbit's Carrot Juice".
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Dave said 1:46PM on 12-30-2008
And the award for most idiotic comment of the day goes to....
Your statement displays an inherent lack of understanding as to Trademarks, Copyrights, and the manner in which infringement works.
Mac Rabbit (OMG someone call VW stat!) is not a competitor to SUN. Their product cannot therefore be infringing on SUNs product unless they were to mis-represent themselves as such.... which they are clearly not doing.
That gray mass between your ears? Use it.
required said 11:22AM on 12-31-2008
LOL. Buckle up Dave. :)
Dr. Watz0n said 1:11PM on 12-30-2008
I've been beta testing Espresso since mid-October, and I have to say, it really isn't any great shakes. As much as I like to use a lightweight editor, I still prefer Dreamweaver over Espresso, CSS Edit, and Textmate.
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LiamM said 2:49PM on 12-30-2008
Look interesting but the price is a bit steep over $80 USD? I think I'll stick with textmate
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Ja said 2:50PM on 12-30-2008
I'm beta testing Espresso and I have to admit that I'm underwhelmed. There's no visual CSS editing, the live preview is clunky and the feature set itself is quite limited. Yes it's got a great editor and the publishing is probably the best I've seen but that's still not enough to pull me from Coda.
It is just a beta so I'll keep watching but for now I'm not all that impressed.
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Ben said 3:05PM on 12-30-2008
I took a look at it earlier today...
The interface is generally nice -- I really wish Coda would have code collapsing -- but overall it doesn't (yet) have any features that really grab me. As Ja said, it is just a beta, so hopefully it will improve over time.
At this point (it is only Beta 1, after all) it really isn't a competitor to Coda just yet. Still, I hope that it does lead to some competition, since that will only make both apps better.
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itsmeee said 5:20PM on 12-30-2008
I use Coda for my web development and while it's not perfect it is great. After seeing Espresso I was really intrigued and looking forward to the Beta so I could try it out myself.
So far I haven't been able to get it to connect to my ftps (I'll try on some different sites tonight). Sadly the bug for connecting to ftp isn't the only bug I found. While messing with it bug after bug presented itself which is kind of scary.
All in all, I'm still excited for Espresso. As I mentioned, Coda is great but it lacks some things that espresso seems to have like code collapse, css snippets in anything but a css page (and sometimes not even there for some odd reason), proper spell checking, server synching and a few other things.
Anyway, I'll keep trying espresso and hopefully it will turn into a good alternative to Coda.
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Shawn said 5:12PM on 12-30-2008
Like others here, I've been beta testing Espresso. While the UI is much more consistent with the Mac experience than other text editors, it really offers nothing more than any of the other competitors out there.
I love CSS Edit, and have often complained about having to leave that program to edit PHP/HTML files. Now, if they actually COMBINED these two products, it would be a wonderful product... and worth the otherwise ridiculous price. Even with my CSS Edit discount, they still want $65 for what is basically a text editor. Ouch.
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Joey said 10:21PM on 12-30-2008
"Now, if they actually COMBINED these two products, it would be a wonderful product... and worth the otherwise ridiculous price."
I was very disappointed to see that Espresso is (currently) just a text editor positioned to work with CSSEdit. I already have a text editor and I already use CSSEdit so Espresso really doesn't offer me anything new.
That's a shame because this app could have been so much better. I guess for now I'll just keep watching the progress of the beta to see where things go.
Quine said 6:00PM on 12-30-2008
I will pay $500 to the first person who makes all textfields (or at least all native ones) have the same functionality as Textmate. I can't use any other app for coding now because basic text entry is so much slower.
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TJ Busse said 3:58PM on 12-31-2008
I think any web development platform on Mac for CSS has to be very very very IE conscious. I couldn't find any mention of IE and its foibles on the site. It's the first thing I always look at a web development platform.
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Dave Barnes said 9:55PM on 12-30-2008
I tried it today.
I still prefer Dreamweaver even though Adobe is rapacious in their pricing.
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