So yesterday I discovered Coda, from www.panic.com, in my travels. I don’t remember where I first found the reference [ed.: I was looking at a website of IconfFactory and they designed the leaf icon. I clicked the link and boom, there's Coda] because as soon as I saw what it was and how it worked, everything else fell out of my head.

Coda, in a nutshell, comprises all the tools I’ve ever used to develop a website (minus the graphics, I’m talking code and site management here). A rich HTML/Script editor with colours/code hinting. Built in standards compliant ‘preview’ (aka browser that works just fine as a general use browser), a slick CSS editor, which you can use w/ GUI or hand code, a TERMINAL for my SSH niggling that I sometimes have to do, and finally a set of Reference Books for HTML, JS, CSS, and PHP.I want to buy this right now. $79 isn’t bad, and I have as of right now stopped using Dreamweaver. There are some minor things that I miss already, like code completion [ed.: yes it has it] and the ability to ‘tab over’ entab a selected block of text (Coda just deletes the block, like most other text editors).

I have loved Panic since I started using the beta of Transmit back on OS9. Their design aesthetic has been copied and borrowed from for years (big fat colourful icons, lots of space, etc) and was way before it’s time. Plus they are Mac nerds so it just feels right to use.

I highly recommend Coda if you build LAMP or OpenSource driven websites. You can even use it to write ASP but I am going to try not to.