Product Reviews

Terminal or the Finder. Keyboard shortcuts or mouse-driven menus. HTML or Wysiwyg drag and drop. It's all down to personal preference, but if you're the kind of Mac user who opts for the former in each of those three alternatives, then Coda was written for you.

At heart, Coda is an old-school web-building tool. It eschews Freeway's DTP approach and drops Dreamweaver's graphical interface to concentrate on tags and code. The developers at Panic design all of their sites that way, and so they wrote Coda as a modal, single-interface web-writing tool. It unifies every task from defining your site parameters to uploading the final creation, using a cut-down version of Transmit. It takes in a fully-hinted coding environment, a powerful but easily understood CSS editor and a set of reference books that simplify the coding process.

This isn't a simple HTML tool, though: it's honed for 14 different languages, including ActionScript, Java, Ruby and PHP, and there are hints and pop-ups to help you complete any unfamiliar tags. The hints include all the appropriate arguments, so that an embedded style sheet is specified with not only its name, but also the correct type and usage

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details.

Yet it isn't written with beginners in mind. While a handy Clips palette lets you drag in commonly used blocks of code, such as the basic structure of a page, some obvious shortcuts are missing, such as the ability to link to a style sheet with a single button-click. Likewise, we'd like to see it hive off all CSS styles to a separate document by default, rather than embedding styling details in the head of a page, which is a shortcut to inconsistencies.

The CSS dialog itself is nothing short of excellent. It would be nave to expect anyone to code their styles entirely by hand, and so Coda sports a fully featured menu-based CSS editor. It could do with a little bit of reorganisation - to put logical sections such as dimensions and layout immediately above and below each other, for example - but once you've got used to it, you'll be knocking up complex designs in no time at all. As with CSSEdit (right), it could teach Adobe a thing or two, as it puts Dreamweaver's multi-paged dialog to shame, and beats its sidebar-based CSS designer hands down.

Hardcore administrators will revel in the Terminal window for managing servers, but for the rest of us, the Transmit-based FTP client will be about as close as we get to playing with the server directly. This shares a pane with the site tree and treats your remote files as though they were local, opening them with a single click, or dispatching them to helper applications from a context-sensitive menu.

If you're a dedicated hand-coder, or are ready to step up from Dreamweaver's built-in code-based environment, Coda is an excellent choice. As one MacUser team member said in the office, it's one of those apps that could make a PC user switch. We don't think that's too high praise at all.