I ♥ Coda

I meant to blog about this yesterday, but lack of sleep made me forget and, realistically, I’m not sure I could have given it the attention it deserves.

Back when Jon Hicks started working on Camino’s new site, he did it using Coda, the new web development app from Panic. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know this. Coda was still in beta and Jon had no reason to tell me he was using it. After Coda was released, I realized that working on Camino’s website would be a perfect excuse to try it out.

And man, I’m glad I did.

Coda is awesome. It’s really that simple. Almost everything about Coda makes it a perfect web development app. Throughout the entire development process, I’ve been using Coda. I purchased a license for it a while back and just can’t stop using it. It actually made me want to build websites more.

It’s funny, really. I thought parts of it might be useless, like the “Books” section. Boy, was I wrong! I’ve queried the books quite a few times, mainly related to CSS issues that I’ve found. Without them, it would have take a while to google for the answer to my problem.

The one thing that I found I missed in Coda was Gecko. There’s no way for me to preview what the website I’m working on will look like in Camino, Firefox, or other Gecko-based browsers. Maybe that’ll be changed one day.

I also got a crash within a day of first using it. I reported the issue and Cabel replied back personally. I tracked down the issue to a webkit crash and reported the bug (which turned out to be a dupe that was fixed on their trunk). While Coda did crash, it was most definitely the fault of webkit.

So what I’m trying to say is… Coda is awesome. I highly recommend it to anyone who does manual web development. Even if you’re PHP-based (which, some of cb.o is), if you’re coding by hand, Coda is for you.