My Love Hate Relationship with Panic Coda

My open letter to Panic Software:
I’ve been using Panic Software’s Coda for several years now. As a web development program, it’s light years ahead of anything else out there. I can vaguely remember the dark days before Coda, there was a program called.. let me see if I can remember… oh yeah, BBEdit.

BBEdit was the de-facto standard text editor for the Mac. I was using it in Mac OS 9, and I still used it in Mac OS X. Back then, you’d build a web site locally, the upload it using your FTP client. Later, Panic Software introduced Transmit, a sexy FTP client that had it all. In fact, I could double click a file on an FTP share and it would open automagically into BBEdit. Then, in BBEdit I could hit Command-S to save the file, and Transmit would re-upload it. Remarkable. It totally changed how I worked on web sites.

Fast forward to 2007. That same little company who produced Transmit, an FTP app that changed the way web developers work, introduced something all together new… Coda. Coda was everything. It could FTP, it could SFTP, it could Edit PHP, HTML, CSS, Text, it would make you a pot of coffee in the morning and the afternoon. It had built in documentation, it had autocomplete, it had built in preview for your pages, it had built in terminal for shell access. Coda was the program that made every Mac web developer wonder what they’d been doing for the past 10 years without it.

Now, fast forward to the present day. It’s almost 2010 and Coda hasn’t changed since 2007. Sure there have been bug fixes here and there, but no new features. No changes. Nothing for three years. (Yes, they did create the Plugins system. Yawn. Plugins are VERY limited as to how they can interact with the Coda core program. Very limited.)

My inspiration for this article is a css file that I just lost while editing in Coda. If you’re a regular Coda user like me (Coda is open more hours in a day than Photoshop on my system) then you’ve no doubt hit this snag at some point. You’re cruising along, working on your files, you hit “SAVE” to save a file back to the FTP, Coda seems to hang. So you wait a few minutes.. still hanging. Hmm. So you hit force quit and find that Coda is not responding… so you kill it. You relaunch it and discover that your precious CSS file is empty. That’s right… the file is still there on the FTP, but it’s empty… If you’re a web developer, and this has happened to you, you know that feeling that you get in your stomach. Like you’ve just been punched in the gut. Now this has happened only 3 times in less than 3 years of using Coda, but that’s too much.

So this brings me to my point. In three years, why has Panic not made any real changes to Coda? Is Coda 2.0 hiding in the depths of Panic? Is it going to change the world like the first version did? Is it going to fix the aforementioned problem with loosing complete files? Will it allow you to organize your web sites into folders? Willing include code collapsing? Will it tie into Apples Time Machine API so as to include an automatic versioning and save a copy every minute? Will it make coffee and donuts?

I hate to bitch and moan about something without offering a solution, so I have one: Panic needs to charge more for CODA. A lot more. Charge $199, or $249. It’s worth it. There’s not a web designer out there using Coda who thinks MS Office or Photoshop is worth more than Coda. Hell, I paid Adobe $499 for a crappy Photoshop CS4 update that does absolutely nothing that CS3 didn’t already do. Talk about feeling like a first class heel. I give Adobe my money almost every year for a worthless update that offers no real forward progress. So Panic, why don’t you come out with an update to Coda every so often that offers some new features? You could make some money. Think about it.

Fact of the matter is… even with all it’s problems, Coda is still the best thing out there. I’m going to go rebuild my lost CSS file now. Ugh.