About a year-and-a-half ago I bought Panic’s Coda. I didn’t just buy it— I bought into it. One window web development. The ‘Publish All’ button in all its glory was simply so satisfying and efficient. It was no longer my job to keep track of which changes had been published and which were local. That summer I built a couple of simple, mostly-static sites with Coda. And I really liked it. It simultaneously adapted to and transformed my workflow.
My maturation as a css writer demonstrates this.That preference was probably more to do familiarity with CSSEdit than any specific deficiency in Coda. When I began using Coda, I held on to CSSEdit. Coda had a snazzy css editor, but it was comparatively clunky. However, as my proficiency with css increased, I kicked the editor out of my workflow. I was comfortable enough writing by hand, so I just wrote from scratch in Coda.
In early August of 2007 I had to build a Rails app, and thus temporarily abandoned Coda for Textmate. Coda is ill-advise/unusable for working with Rails. Textmate is shockingly good (to sacrilegiously reference Panic). In ways that I didn’t notice until I’d spent a couple months using Coda. The syntax highlighting is smart and robust. The ties-in with the Terminal and Transmit are convenient. The bundles and macros are life/time saving. The super-light ‘projects’ are far more flexible than the more concrete counterpart in Coda. Especially when deploying to multiple servers— a very annoying requirement to satisfy in Coda.
Nonetheless, the Rails project finished up, and along came another simple static site. I returned happily to Coda. I was developing and testing locally, deploying to a single shared server. An ideal project for the application. I did notice its flaws. The text-editor is inferior. But I was just writing xhtml and css and some simple php— what advanced text-editing features would I need? An altogether enjoyable experience. At that point, the ‘Sites’ panel was filling up, which was great. A client would send an email asking for a little change to be made, and I could open up Coda, double click on the site and it would remember which files I had open.Because Coda knows that clients tend to ask for the same page to be changed back and forth ad nauseam. Panic’s web development software has established itself in my workflow.
Recently most of my projects have been big php apps, and I’ve once again left Coda for it’s thinner and more talented cousin. Textmate and Transmit (and recently Versions). A unmatchable team for development.
But earlier today I got an email from a client asking for a little change. Which I made. In Coda.
So what’s the point? I guess the point is this: I started writing this ‘blessay’ a la Stephen Fry with the intention of condemning Coda, yet I realise that, in fact, Coda has a place in my flowing workflow as well.
subscribe to 
hosted on a 