dirtystylus

For the last few days I’ve been playing around with Coda, the new web development environment from Panic. It’s a throwback to the old HomeSite-style editors, taking a site-level approach to web development. Daring Fireball had a nice writeup on the philosophy behind Coda, and how it differs from the prevailing web development tools currently available on OS X. I highly recommend that anyone doing web development with your bedrock HTML/CSS/[Scripting language] check it out. The UI is quite simple and beautiful, which is not a surprise to anyone who has used Transmit or CandyBar before.

I was initially disappointed with the app, not because I disagreed with the site-oriented approach, but because it simply didn’t load Actionscript files. Attempting to map the .as file extension to Javascript didn’t work, either. I put the app aside, thinking I’d check back in at version 1.5 or so.

Well, version 1.0.1 just dropped and Actionscript is now supported, so I’m back to playing around with it. The function list is much better than in TextMate, where it’s hidden in a footer drop-down. I was hoping that class properties would also get entries in the list, but so far it’s just functions. Again, this is only version 1, so I’m sure some of this stuff will find its way into future releases. At present the editor doesn’t have the bundle/macro power of TextMate, so I doubt that I’ll be switching over at this point. The future looks promising, though, and if they ever get site-level class browsing and Actionscript hinting like FlashDevelop I’ll certainly be taking another test drive.