Coda is a Web Development application for Mac OS X. Developed by Panic, Coda is shareware. Coda was released officially by Panic on April 23, 2007.
| Coda | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Developer(s) | Panic |
| Stable release | |
| Operating system | Mac OS X |
| Type | Web development |
| License | Proprietary EULA |
| Website | Panic - Coda - One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X |
Concept & Idea
The concept for Coda came from the web team at Panic, who hand coded their website. They would have 5 or 6 different programs running, for example, SubEthaEdit for editing PHP files, Safari for previewing the webpage, a CSS editor, Transmit for FTP, Terminal or a MySQL manager, and another browser window or PDF file open as a language reference. They realized that there were few to no full-featured website development platforms equivalent to Xcode, so they created their own.
Development
Currently, little is known about the actual development of Coda. What is known fron Steven Frank's (Panic, Inc. co-founder) blog is that Coda has been an internal project at Panic for over a year and a half [1]. Assigned to the project were 5 engineers, 3 people on support and testing, one designer, and one Japanese localizer [2].
Sections
The entire application is divided into 6 sections, which are accessed through 6 tabs at the top of the application. Users can also use split screen mode, where you have access to two tabs at one time. For example, an editor for the top half of the screen, and the browser at the bottom.
Sites
In Coda, sites are the equivalent of "projects" in many other applications, like Textmate. Each site has its own set of files, its own FTP settings, etc. When you close Coda in the midst of a project and then open up Coda and go back into the project, you are presented with exactly what it was like before you closed the app. Another creative and useful feature is the ability to add a Local and Remote version to each site. When you make changes to one version, for example, a Local version, you can press "Publish All" which saves the file in both versions. The same functionality applies to creating new files, deleting files, etc.
Files
Coda incorporates a slimmed down version of Panic's popular FTP client, Transmit, dubbed Transmit Turbo, which is currently closed-source at Panic. The Files portion is basically a regular FTP, SFTP, FTP+SSL, and WebDAV client, where you can edit, delete, create, and rename files and folders to your heart's content.
Editor
The editor is, to most, the meat of the application, and will most probably be the most discussed item, as everyone has their own preference. Instead of build their own editor from the ground up, Panic licensed the popular editing software, SubEthaEdit, and built upon that to create the editor found in Coda.
The editor takes advantage of SubEthaEdit's unique Subetha Engine to allow for sharing of documents over the Bonjour network. Coda also boasts a revolutionary new Find/Replace mechanism, which allows for users to do quick replaces using regular expressions, without actually using regular expressions. From the Coda website:
Revolutionary Find/Replace. The power of Grep with drag and drop simplicity? It's a Coda first. Want to swap the width and height tags in all of your images? It’s as simple as searching for width=“replacement token” height=“replacement token” and replacing it with width=“replacement token” height=“replacement token”. That’s it: Coda does the rest. Drag the tokens where you need them, and use as many as you want. (Hard core users can still use regular expressions directly.)