After Much Work, Panic Ships Coda v1.5
I've been on the Coda mailing lists for quite a while and have heard the rumblings about the possible death of the product. Nothing more than rumors. A small shop like Panic needs to pace what they are doing to make sure that they deliver a good product year after year. In contrast to popular belief in Corporate America, you can't expect to have a home run app (or release) every month on a tight budget. So we have had to wait.
Coda 1.5 is finally out, and it looks to have some significant improvements, and yet some significant omissions. Maybe these follow a certain usage pattern, and if so, then it's my usage of the tool that's abnormal. For instance, Coda 1.5 has built-in support for Subversion. Great. Why not CVS too? It's not that different. The core tools are on Mac OS X, so they don't have to worry about that. Still, it's nice that they have something in the way of source control, I only have to make a subversion server and migrate a repository to there, but that's a weekend.
Secondly, they add find/replace across multiple files (along with a significantly improved editor - don't know what that means for SubEthaEdit) which will help people fixing multiple links in a web system, but they have no facility for invoking a graphics editor like Photoshop, Acorn, etc. You can drag an image into a page, and it'll place the img tag there, but you can't shell out to a third-party graphics editor? Seems that would be an easy addition and then even if it's not "all in one", it's available for seamless workflow.
I like the tool. It's slick and polished. I don't have a great use for it at this time because I'm not maintaining a dozen websites daily. What I have used it for, I like, and will continue to try and fin things to work on with it. But even I can see the trade-offs they had to make on this release. It's showing more of how it's meant to be used, and what it's not meant to do.