Coda Video Review
Most of us know Coda as the radically productive web development tool from Panic, which recently won the User Experience Award at WWDC. Coda has some features none of the competition has including live editing, a built-in CSS editor, and a library of reference materials for programmers. MacApper already did a full coda review way back in late April when it was released, but I thought it would be cool to do a video review of this tool, to better illustrate some of its core features.
In the video I cover how to create and manage a site, how to use the ftp client, how to edit code clips for use in your web projects, and how to utilize the reference library.
Coda is a great application, but I just can’t afford it’s rather hefty price tag. I’m only a small-time freelance developer, but find coda’s advanced features very useful.
I would’ve appreciated a better CSS tool though, that let’s you change CSS properties live on the web page (there’s a firefox plugin that does this…).
i can’t stand GUI’s when it comes to coding, i love doing everything by hand. I still use coda, but i just do the CSS by hand
Coda + CSSEdit here. That combo can’t be beaten IMO.
Jack Cory: I thought the same as you until trying CSSEdit. Sure, you can do everything by hand, but being able to group and drag everything around the way CSSEdit can is well worth the money (not to mention the brilliant “suck the CSS out of this web page and let me edit on the fly” feature).
“Coda has some features none of the competition has including live editing”
As much as I love Coda (LOTS!), there’s no way it was the first, or is the only editor to have live WebKit preview. HyperEdit and many others have had this for quite some time.
Macworld review :
http://www.macworld.com/2007/07/reviews/coda102/index.php/
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Macworld’s buying advice
After testing, it became clear to me that Coda 1.0.3 is a work in progress. Panic says that it is going to be updating Coda based on user feedback, and the application will need a lot of updating to be able to hold its own against mature applications. If you don’t own any Web development programs yet and are looking to start hand-coding Web sites, Coda is a good first step. Otherwise, wait for subsequent versions before tossing out programs like BBEdit () and TextMate.
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Arjun Muralidharan: Hefty price? Dreamweaver is USD$399…
i’ve css edit, didn’t like it.
Very nice video review, Kiro. I love Coda. It’s so simple.
Marc Edwards: Dreamweaver is a bloated WYSIWYG editor. Coda is great, and the price is legitimate, but I still am hesitant to pay that much for an editor that does FTP. As Macworld says, I too think Coda needs improvement, especially in the CSS area.
I like the concept just because I used to live in Dreamweaver.
For the last year I been using TextMate with Transmit and nothing else compares.
Coda text editor can’t touch the power of what you can do it TextMate.
It is just what works for me. I do think Coda is great for people that need a wysiwyg though.
Derek Fons. Coda is not a WYSIWYG, thank god. It does give you a live “Preview” but you can not make and edits to your source files in that view.
Coda if in my opinion fantastic, I use Coda for all my PHP dev work and Textmate for all my Ruby on Rails dev. I do my RoR deployments from SVN so Textmate works great since Coda doesn ot have SVN integration (yet?).