Michael Verner - Pittsburgh Web Development

I am working on my first site without Dreamweaver in about eight years. It is a little scary, but I think Coda is more than up to the task. I am going to write my impressions of the program as I work on building a Photoshop mockup into HTML. Gotta start out slow... breaking up is hard to do.

10:12 am
I just finished setting up a site in Coda. It was really simple. I love the built in Terminal functionality - it allowed me to setup the site on my testing server without opening up a separate window. Real slick. Only issue... I normally start a site with a standard set of files (a basic header/footer and reset CSS) and I'm used to copy/pasting that from site to site - Coda can't do that.

10:15 am
*SOLUTION* Didn't take long to find a solution for the problem up above - CLIPS! This is way better even. You can save snippets of code (on a site or global basis) and easily insert them into your documents with just a few clicks (and even keywords). Very handy!

For example, now if I type "baseCSS" + TAB into any document, my standard base CSS is automatically displayed. Awesome, yes?

10:18am
More awesomeness, if you cursor over (or type) an ending curly brace } or parenthesis ), Coda automatically shows you the corresponding brace or parenthesis it is closing with a neat little bubble animation.

10:31am
Coda even has a built-in Lorem Ipsum (http://www.lipsum.com) generator. How about tossing this into Photoshop, Adobe?

10:36am
Coda seems so snappy, so I checked out the good old Activity Monitor to see how it compares to Dreamweaver. Truthfully, they use about the same about of memory. Here's the weird thing though. Dreamweaver is constantly using about 16-17% of my processor - even when I'M NOT DOING ANYTHING WITH IT! What are you doing with my processor, Dreamweaver? Coda uses 0%. Good deal! Also, I've noticed far fewer spinning beach balls (waiting icon) in Coda. I really don't remember one. This round goes to Coda!

11:10am
I just discovered the Code Navigator. It allows you to easily navigate through whatever document you have open by clicking on automatically generated "bookmarks". For example, in an HTML document, you can move quickly to an named HTML element (where you've set the id). You can also add specially formatted comments that will show up in the Code Navigator. I was a little bummed that Coda didn't have "code collapse" feature that Dreamweaver has, but this is a more than adequate alternative.

11:18am
Coda's file navigator is way more robust that Dreamweaver's. Whenever I created new images in Dreamweaver, I would always have to hit the "Refresh" button to see the new files, but Coda automatically refreshes. I've haven't had any problem not seeing a file that I knew was there.

11:22am
Coda also makes it easy to switch between code and preview modes (or any other mode - terminal, CSS, etc). Just CMD+2 for code view and CMD+3 for preview mode. It is quick and intuitive. I just need to install VMWare Fusion so I can integrate Internet Explorer into the preview modes. Then I won't have to start up a virtual machine. No more Windows!

11:25am
Live validation mode rocks the socks, BUT it doesn't work in HTML/PHP mode. Grrr... argh! There should be some way to do this. Could there just be a way to submit the resulting code from a live server to a validation server?

11:47am
Block-edit mode is a really cool feature in Coda. CMD+SHIFT+B puts you into block-edit mode. Any text that was selected when you went into block-edit mode, will then be appended with whatever you type until you exit block-edit mode (with ESC). This works good to comment out many lines of code, or indent sections of code. However it was easier to indent/de-indent in Dreamweaver, just select and hit TAB or SHIFT+TAB. I do miss that.

11:53am
Nevermind, you can easily shift large blocks of text left or right with SHIFT+[ and SHIFT+] respectively. Sweet!

12:12pm
Hmm... no popup hint menu for HTML entities (such as ® and »). I've come to depend on that. Should be easy to do right? I just added some common ones as Clips, but it should be easier.

1:00pm
Kind of a big problem... no way to do image maps? That's a bummer. I had to open up Dreamweaver (it has a great image map interface where you can draw your clickable areas right on the image).

3:21pm
Love the "Publish All" button. It knows what has changed and just publishes those changes.

3:50pm
Finally done (I was working on some other stuff intermittently... I'm not that slow. Conclusion? I'm sticking with it. Dreamweaver won't be uninstalled from my machine just yet, but I'm sure not upgrading to CS4. If you want to try out Coda go to the Panic Software site at http://www.panic.com. If you are an advanced developer, I think you are going to like it a lot!