Hi Tim, Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast podcast here.
Ok, on with this week’s review, which is the software application Coda from Panic Software. You know I like tools that solve real problems, and Coda definitely sang my song when they said on the panic.com/coda website:
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.” Hey – that’s MY work flow! I didn’t think of it as wonky until they described it. Coda is $69, which is on the high side for shareware, but if it can streamline all of that, it could be worth it.
The very first thing Coda did made me happy – it was a big button that said Import Transmit Favorites. this is a good thing, because Transmit is exactly what I use to upload files to my servers! Already it looks like it’s integrating my tools. Coda was smart enough to import my servers from Transmit which was most excellent, didn’t have to enter all that glop again. When I imported my two servers, it did a cute thing – it showed them as papers taped to a wall, and the papers looked like the home pages of the servers. Hovering near the name of the server showed a little i in the corner, and just like a Mac Dashboard widget, it flips over and shows the settings for that server.
I tried double clicking one of the sites, and it comes up with an untitled.html in the right pane. the left pane shows my local disk with a tab above it that says Local. The tab next to it says Remote and clicking it brings up a button that says connect, clicking that connected me to the server I had chosen. Pretty slick. Across the top there are 6 colorful buttons, the Coda leaf is for Sites (that’s where you can see the papers tacked to the wall). Edit allows you to edit HTML on the fly (taking the place of Taco or Text Wrangler. There’s a Preview button which lets you launch your browser. It looked like it had a pull-down with Firefox as the first option, but it didn’t actually pull down, it was a button that always launched my default browser Firefox.
The next control across the top is CSS, and it presents a WHOLE bunch of CSS stuff I know nothing about. I did read the first 50 pages of Teach Yourself CSS in 10 minutes, but it was a while ago, I’m a bit rusty you see. the next button is for the Terminal, and I dearly wish i could use this button. You see, it’s sole function is to allow you to SSH, or secure shell into your remote server. It would be delightful to be able to access my server from the command line within Coda, not having to launch Terminal separately. The reason I’m despondent instead of delighted is that GoDaddy does not allow SSH access to their servers with a shared hosting account, you can only get that access if you have a dedicated server with them. I don’t have the kind of traffic that warrants a dedicated server, so I have the more common shared hosting account. I think GoDaddy is unusual in this – secure shell access is kind of assumed in the industry and not something certainly that requires a dedicated server. If you have a different hosting company who allows you secure access to your server, this imbedded terminal will delight you.
The final button is called Books, and this is probably one of the most interesting features of Coda. it’s actually a set of books you can use as references. there’s books on HTML, CSS (if you’re rusty), JavaScript, and php! Double clicking on these virtual books brings up hyperlinked indices to instruction on the specific topics you choose. you do need internet access for these to work, but that seems like a reasonable assumption if you’re going to be logged into your server, doing file transfers and all that.
Speaking of file transfers, I tested out that capability. I was able to easily figure out how to do it, but I’m not sure it’s the way I like it. remember I told you earlier that there are two tabs – one for local and one for remote? Once you’re logged in on the remote side, you can navigate to where you want to start dropping files. go over to the local side and find the directory from which you want to transfer files. on the local side, drag the file up to the remote tab, and it switches over to the remote server, then hover over where the files are and you can let go of the file and voila, it’s transferred.
I like the method where you can see both sides at the same time, having to have blind faith that it will switch properly is kind of disconcerting, but it does work pretty easily when you get used to it. i didn’t see any way to set up shortcuts to certain folders, which I use a lot on Transmit. Each week I create a new folder for the most recent episode of the NosillaCast, and once I set up the folders in the sidebar of Transmit, I never have to navigate my folder structure for the rest of the week. I wish Coda had that feature, but I couldn’t find it with my usual poking around method of learning.
That brings me to an important point here – I’m not sure that I’m the best person to judge Coda – I went into the help menus looking for some kind of work flow tutorial, and I found reams and reams of instruction that I am not versant in web design enough to understand! I think this tool is meant for someone with much more skill at this than I have, I’ll go back to my piecemeal method of patching together each of these applications to do the job. I don’t want to discourage anyone though, I still think the premise of Coda is fantastic, to put together each of these tools.
For more reviews like this, check out the NosillaCast hosted at podfeet.com. By the way, I’ll be celebrating my two year anniversary on next week’s show, so it looks like I got the podcasting bug just a couple of weeks after you Tim! I think I’ll torture my audience by playing my very first show (95 shows ago), it’s simply dreadful. Thanks Tim, talk to you next week!
