Don’t Panic. Get Coda.

As a consultant I wear quite a few hats, as it were. I troubleshoot issues with Macintosh computers. I set up & install new Macintosh systems. I develop and implement FileMaker databases. I also do web design and development.

Wearing the chapeau of web developer I have several tools that I use regularly. Besides the obvious ones like Adobe Dreamweaver CS4, I use a little coding application from Panic called Coda.

I use Coda regularly. As they say on their website “text editor + file transfer + svn + css + terminal + books + more = whoah.” I don’t know if I could have explained it better. It’s a text/code editor, with full color formatting to make code snippets more easily identifiable, and readable. It’s allows me to save every site I’m working on as it’s own file within Coda. So when I want to work on my eMac blog I double click, and Coda will FTP to my eMac blog folder on my hosts server & I’m ready to go. This allows me to edit code live. If there are minor changes I need to make to my WordPress theme, I can do it live.

Whether it’s editing a index.php file or a CSS file I make the change in Coda, hit save, go to my browser hit refresh and I see the changes I just made to my page. If it still needs more tweaks. I repeat the steps until It looks the way I want it to look. Live editing is not for the newbie, or the fain of heart. I also use Coda to SSH into my hacked & cracked iPhone when I need to add files or make changes there too.

One of my favorite features in Coda is its CSS editor. It’s so good I wish Adobe would take cues from Panic or license the interface. But until that time I set up Dreamweaver to open a CSS file into Coda when it’s double-clicked. In Coda I can look at my CSS code in one of several ways. Of course as text, but their multi column setup is so intuitive. I can view my CSS code in Visual Mode, Text Mode, or any combination of both.

I’m sure I could go on and on … go check Coda out for yourself.

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