Too Many Words

Today was another weather spectacular, with warm sunny sunshine and breezy breezes. I got up, designed a flier, went to class (where I actually had done the reading and knew what I was talking about for once in that crazy ancient lesbian Spanish class (that’s not derogatory, the class focuses on women in colonial Latin America with “gender issues”)) and then got some work done on my computer and went to DC.

I get all the RSS feeds from MacWorld and TUAW, etc. and usually I read the headlines for new software releases and pay them little mind unless it really grabs me. Well, today’s grabbed me. Panic Inc. is a software company for Mac that clearly develops software to fit a need rather than to sell a product. I use two of their products, and with the release today of their newest, I was immediately on board.

I use Transmit because it is bar-none the best FTP/WebDAV client for Mac in existence. Maybe one of the most jolting differences when switching from PC to a Mac was that all the developers on the Internet wanted to charge for their Mac software. That’s obviously a generalization, seeing as much of the software I used on a PC was not freeware, and a number of apps I use on my Mac are. However, if it wasn’t a huge application to fit a major need (i.e. office applications, photo manipulation, web development), there were usually PC offerings that were freeware. Particularly, FTP clients abounded. When I switched to the Mac, I was relegated to using the command line for a time while I shopped for clients with a solid GUI and functionality. I tried Fetch, but I really never liked it. Finally I started using Transmit, and Panic charmed the money out of my hands pretty quickly. It’s a great piece of software, responds very quickly, and I don’t have to fire it up and then wait like I do for some other apps.

I also use Stattoo, which places transparent panels over your desktop with system information and other little useful widgets like an iCal panel and the weather. It’s not a life-saver, but it is a nice app. It’s available as a free trial, as is all the Panic software.

Ok, so with all that backstory, we find ourselves at today, when Panic released Coda, a new web-dev suite/app. I say suite because it includes pretty much all the features of all the various software you use to do web development, and yet, it’s only one application. The Coda website explains it more simply (and prettily) than I can here, but it is remarkable how easy it is to get up and running and how intuitive it is to use. The app combines the functionality of at least 5 applications I use when developing for the web - Dreamweaver, Transmit, Terminal, Adium, and Firefox/Safari.

• Dreamweaver - It has everything a real web developer uses minus a WYSIWYG interface, which I don’t really use anyway. So there aren’t plug-ins for Flash and automated image roll-overs. I still have a license for Dreamweaver, and I’m not uninstalling it anytime soon, but I really like the thought of not having to fire up the equivalent of the Death Star to shoot down a TIE Fighter. (For those of you not accustomed to Star Wars metaphors, a) what are you doing reading my blog? and b) you’re not a real developer. Nice try.)
• Transmit - It is very closely integrated with Transmit (so far as to offer a $10 discount to license holders) and can selectively import all your Transmit sites with one click. Transmit can still be used for bulk uploads, but the workflow of “save & publish without thinking” is very intuitive.
• Terminal - You can pop open a pane and connect through SSH to any host that supports it. I admit I don’t use this one as frequently as I know other web developers will, but there are still the occasions when I need to check file permissions, access MySQL from the command line, or kick Apache in the teeth and tell it to restart. It is also useful for installing and administrating other apps and frameworks (Python CMS ringing a bell?).
• Adium - Yes, this is a chat program. But with Coda, you can share your code with co-workers through Bonjour incorporated right into the workspace. This is a way to implement remote pair programming (where two programmers work on one task together at one computer) in real-time. This means nothing to people who aren’t nerds, but to nerds this is very exciting.
• Firefox/Safari -
  • The benefit here is two-fold. Because most of my projects are based on PHP, and many interact with MySQL or XML data backends, I must constantly upload to a server to test the changes I just made. I would estimate I upload a file approximately 6 to 10 times per hour of working on it. Regardless of what this may or may not say about my personal coding habits, it is a waste of time. With the in-app preview ability, because I am running Apache and PHP on my local machine, I can see a live environment preview without leaving the app. I’ll probably also install MySQL and use test dbs in the near future.
  • I do most of my research through the web because despite the veritable library at my work desk, we are lacking a PHP or CSS book (we have 82 Java books though), and the online documentation for both of these languages is extremely complete and simple to access. The application comes with the entire published copy of Web Programmer’s Desk Reference (HTML + CSS + JavaScript) and the Official Reference Guide for PHP.

Of course, this doesn’t even mention the features not found in the other programs, like the CSS style editor, clip manager, and DOM browser. Through various Firefox plug-ins or Dreamweaver sections you can achieve the same effect, but these are simple and intuitive to use. The final straw is that it just looks nice. It embodies the Mac mindset of suave, functional software. It’s eye-candy, but there’s nothing superfluous about it. Mouse clicks are minimized, floating transparent panes and split panels are easy to manage, and it just does what you want when you want it to do it. Most coders now are used to Dreamweaver so they find it familiar, but the creators of this app were coders who made an app that fit how a coder should code. As they say in the introduction,

So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we realized. “And much cooler.”

So simple, and yet, so right. Their whole mentality is summed up with inspiration on their essays page. It’s a short read, and one I recommend if anything in the above 1300 words caught your interest for even a second.

Filed under: Internet, Information, Products, Technology, Reviews