One of my favorite hobbies is web development. I love the ease of creating rich web pages with great technology like CSS and XHTML. But add in some JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL, and developing for the web becomes a large task. It often requires switching back and forth between 3 or 4 different apps just to work on one website. I personally used SubEthaEdit as my editor, Transmit for uploading, WebKit and Firefox for previewing, and Finder to manage my sites.

So imagine my surprise and joy earlier this week when Panic released Coda, a full featured "all-in-one" web development tool. I was initially skeptical, but realized this was Panic; if anyone could do this app right, they could. I decided to give it a serious shot to see how it worked with my workflow.

Surprisingly, Coda is really, really nice. The editor on its own is very well done, with great code completion and "Clips" - little snippets of commonly used text. It also features a full CSS editor, "books" for reference material, and a terminal. The fact that the whole app works like Transmit to upload your changes is just icing on the cake.

But does it really work better than Transmit + SubEthaEdit? The definite answer is "Yes!" You'll never realize how much time is actually wasted switching back and forth between a large number of apps before you use Coda. The point isn't being one window, it's integration - everything is integrated really well.

A few tips I personally found to be helpful:

• Switch the editor font to 10.0pt Monaco. If you're anything like me, you're probably used to this font for coding and will agree it makes things much easier to read.


• Make a vertical split with code on the left and preview on the right. This works very well if you have a widescreen monitor.


• Hold down the Clips button to make a menu appear instead of the distracting HUD window.


• CMD-Double Click any text to have it open in the Books section. This is similar behavior to Xcode.

I have a few gripes with it of course. Tabs are strangely forced on you - I don't want tabs opening all the time. And Panic somehow thinks that, by default, I want to view images in Coda! No no, I want to edit them in Photoshop. Overall, however, it's very well done. It's only going to get better from here on.



Cool: All-in-one integrated application. A++ editor based on SubEthaEdit. Site management. Built-in documentation.
Lame: Tabs are forced on you - no great way to control if tabs should be opened or not. Can't re-order tabs. Would like external editing automatically instead of having to ctrl-click (for Photoshop).

Coda is available from Panic, with an introductory price of $79, or $69 if you own Transmit 3.

I'll say it again: there's way too much cool stuff coming out this year. Year Zero, the new Nine Inch Nails album, came out yesterday. I've been listening to the leaked version for a couple of weeks, and it is very raw and very cool. Year Zero tells a story of the future, in a world where the trends of the current U.S. administration have continued. Like all NIN music, it will definitely take a few listens through to grow on, but it's well worth it.

One more thing. Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor has released the first single from the new album, Survivalism, in GarageBand format. He's done this previously for two other songs, letting fans easily make remixes. Reznor says he wants to eventually make the entire Year Zero album available in this format. Considering most artists would never even consider doing this for one of their songs, it really is awesome.

Twitter is a great new web app that aims to make the ubiquitous "What's Up?" question obsolete, or at least more easily accessible. In Twitter, status messages are entered as "tweets" in 140 characters or less. (If you haven't heard of Twitter, go check it out - my Twitter name is dmacdonald)

But in an age where web apps are supposed to be replacing desktop apps, Twitter works best on the desktop. Meet Twitterrific, by the Iconfactory. Twitterrific is a desktop application that interfaces with your Twitter account.

Why is Twitterrific good? In a nutshell:

• It notifies you of new tweets as they arrive
• It has a really simple but effective user interface
• It allows you to enter and reply to tweets very easily
• It fits into your workflow as an unobtrusive as a HUD-style window

Most of these advantages are simply impossible to compete with in a strictly browser-based interface. So sometimes you have to wonder why the app is not officially endorsed by Twitter. After using it for a prolonged period of time, the official web interface is pretty pathetic; I know I definitely wouldn't even consider using Twitter if a similar desktop app did not exist. Yes, Twitter will also send tweets to your IM handle, but that really is quite a bit of a hack. It's not as elegant, at least.

Web apps alone aren't always the answer. Twitterrific proves that sometimes a complimentary desktop app is the secret ingredient to something really wonderful.

acrylicapps.com

I'm very pleased to announce one piece of my new project here today. Acrylic Apps is a new software venture that will be launching later this year, sometime late summer. We've been working hard on a really amazing app that you'll be hearing lots about soon. For now, sign up to our mailing list and you'll receive information about what's coming (including beta signups!) when it becomes available. Thanks!

Once again, I've redesigned my blog. I have no idea what revision this is, but it's definitely the best one yet.

The redesign this time had three goals. I wanted to make the entire page wider and more spacey, while still keeping focus on the actual posts. Much like an OS X application, the light blue background in the sidebar helps your eyes quickly distinguish it from the content. Secondly, I wanted to use less raw bitmap images and more simple colours, allowing all text on the page to be resized without issues. Finally, the actual posts needed to be easier on the eyes to read; it turns out Helvetica isn't exactly the most comfortable font for reading paragraphs of text, so I switched to a much nicer serif font.

It looks best in the best browser (Safari); I'm still tweaking it for other browsers. Comments and suggestions are welcome as always.