Ever since I bought the MacBook Pro I like to look around for web design and development tools that I can run on a Mac. I am not expecting to find a replacement for Visual Studio 2008, but perhaps various tools on the Mac that could be used in replace of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Expression Web, Expression Design, etc. I use in Windows. I don't need a web design and development tool on the Mac since I can run these other Windows applications via VMware Fusion, but I would like to start using Mac-native applications for more day-to-day work.
Coda
One of the tools I found to be thought of quite highly by other Mac web developers is Coda, which is described as a one-window web development tool that provides a Text Editor, FTP application, CSS Editor, etc. It feels like a slim-down version of Adobe Dreamweaver to me with a very usable and attractive user interface that I would love to see in more applications I use:
If you have used Adobe Dreamweaver, you will find this application very easy to use. You essentially add a new site by specifying the FTP address, username and passwords, local and remote folders, etc. Shown above I added my own website. You then just select the website and connect to it. There is a tab to view local files and remote files. Clicking on a remote or local file opens up the file in the editor for you to modify or view it. It comes complete with syntax highlighting, some pretty cool search-and-replace, dom inspection, preview, split windows where you can view and edit at the same time, clips where you can drag and drop common code snippets from your list of clips into the editor, spell checker, etc. The CSS Editor is pretty nice, similar to what you get from say Expression Web. All in all, Coda is pretty darn functional for only $79.
Coda lacks a toolbox, however, so if you are expecting a toolbox where you can drag and drop various ASP.NET and HTML tools to the editor, you aren't going to find one. You could use the clips, but I don't know how functional that would be on a long-term basis. You would have to try it out. Coda doesn't seem to know or realize too much about ASP.NET, too. When I chose ASP-HTML as my default page to be created, it ended up creating a “.asp” page as opposed to “.aspx”. It also won't validate the HTML in an ASP.NET Page as well. That being said, this would probably work pretty well for ASP.NET MVC Framework Views, but then so would any editor.
Coda does have some pretty cool change tracking for one-click publishing to the web server. Essentially if you are changing many web pages in your site, Coda will keep track of them and mark those web pages that have changed with an arrow. Once you are done making all your changes, you can either publish those pages to the web server one at a time or click the “Publish All” button that will FTP all the changed web pages to the server.
As someone who normally uses Visual Studio 2008, Adobe Dreamweaver, and Expression Web, Coda is definitely lacking a lot of bells and whistles. For me, it probably doesn't make sense parting with the $80 as much as I really dig Coda's interface and simplicity. However, if you don't have other tools, I could definitely see purchasing Coda.
You can learn more about Coda from Panic here.
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