Beta Beat: MacRabbit's Espresso released as public beta

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look interesting but the price is a bit steep over $80 USD? I think I'll stick with textmate

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.

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".