Coda

Espresso

Mac Dev Tools Worth Having

For a lot of people, the Mac is seen as the PC for a “creative person”. Very “artsy.” Now, I’ve spent years (decades) developing code on Sun workstations, DEC equipment, and PC’s – the Mac, and the tools that are available on it beat all that stuff by a wide margin.

For starters, Mac OS X is itself a Linux environment. So no more shoe-horning a WAMP environment onto a PC. It’s not needed (although I do use MAMP for the Mac because Apple chose not to install some of the standard PHP extensions as standard, but for most developers this may not be needed).

But what IDE does one run? Sure, you can install the ever-present Eclipse platform. Which is capable of pretty much anything and everything if you locate/install/configure/incant the right stuff. For me, Eclipse was just too much work to get running, too slow, and too idiosynchratic to use on a daily basis.

Thus enters Coda, by Panic. Coda combines a solid code editor, a rock-solid FTP client, a terminal, a CSS editor, Subversion, and site management in one package. If you code in Rails or work with CMS-based sites, the inclusion of a SSH terminal which remembers passwords is a life saver. No more neededing to reach for Terminal or iTerm when you need to launch mongrel or change some folder protection – just open a tab, hit the button and you’re in.

Subversion support is a recent addition to Coda and it works well. I still find it more reliable to do high volume operations from the command line, but for ongoing code changes the way Coda shows you what’s changed and what needs to be added to your repository is pretty damn good.

Coda also supports multi-file search and Regex search. Both of which can also do replace. You don’t appreciate the value of these features until you need them. There is also support for snippets and the latest major release also supports plug-ins. So the text-manipulation capabilities of Coda are now able to grow beyond what the Panic developers have time to do. Coda supports FTP and SFTP and allows for live-editing of a site’s files right on the server. This is also something one doesn’t appreciate until one needs it.

For $99, Coda is a solid investment. I’ve built everything from small client sites to medium sized WordPress and Joomla CMS sites to very large PHP-mySQL and Rails sites with it, and Coda has come through every time. I have never hit a case where I had to say “it won’t let me do that” on something I was working on. Which is what an IDE should be able to claim.

But …

There are a lot of times where I need to do a small site for a client and I don’t need a big IDE. I need something small that can deploy the small site to possibly several domain installations (for proofing or mirroring). I still want to be able to edit and browse the files on the server, but I don’t need the project management. And it has to be fast.

The latest MacHeist served up Espresso, by MacRabbit (makers of the excellent CSSEdit). Espresso uses project files instead of a built-in project manager … which is actually what I wanted since the number of projects I have floating around kind of overwhelms Coda’s interface. Rather than use conventional tabs, Espresso uses a list of open files and previews. This takes a little getting used to, but it actually works better than tabs once you gave more than a dozen files open.

As expected, the CSS editor is great in Espresso. The code editor is also very good, with inteligent tag completion and all that good stuff. The system is extensible by “sugars” so as this gets into more developers hands I expect the language support to continue to improve, much as it did with TextMate.

Snippets are supported, but no Subversion. Which is OK for what I intend to use this for. I don’t mind firing up a SVN client every few days as the need to check in isn’t as high on smaller projects. The FTP support is one thing I really love about Espresso. You can define multiple FTP sites, so you can deploy to your staging server, the client’s server, and potentially other servers as well (mirrors, portfolios, etc. etc.).  You can also browse and edit in place for each FTP desitination, which is great for quick touch-ups.

I did have a few FTP connection problems with Espresso when I was working from a hotel, Coda worked like a charm. But that was Espresso 1.0.1 … MacRabbit made stability improvements since that release, so I expect those problems are gone now as well.

At around $80, Espresso is a little on the pricey side compared to Coda. Coda simply does more and lists for only $20 more. Had I not gotten Espresso as part of the MacHeist bundle, I might not have bothered with it. Which isn’t a knock on Espresso as a product, just that for the list price it’s hard to justify not getting Coda instead. If Espresso was closer to $40, it’d be a no-brainer to get it in addition to Coda.

Being able to turn any tab into a launchable desktop application is also great. It means I can now retire Prism from my Windows machine as Chrome does a better job – especially on GMail, Google Docs, and so on – go figure.

The minimalist interface gets in the way in some cases – like trying to figure out how to manage bookmarks. And if you’re used to the features you can end up with in Firefox once you load up all your add-ons, Chrome may be a downer. Because it does what it does – it does it fast and reliably, but that’s all it does.

But that isn’t bad. Use Firefox when you need your add-ons for downloading video or inserting BB-codes into message boards. Use Chrome for your web applications where you want them launched fast and you don’t need anything else getting in the way.

The one huge, huge problem with Chrome … it’s Windows only. Of course, this makes sense given the market share of That Platform. But still. The ‘Net runs on Linux and most of the best design work is done on the Mac. The opinion-makers don’t like on Windows 24×7. I’m sure Google will correct this.

In summary, Chrome is the ideal browser for accessing web-based applications (version control, project management, email, billing systems, and so on). It’s worth a shot and, while it may not take market share away from Internet Explorer, every user who can be lured away from it can be considered a “win” for web designers.

Enter “ShoveBox“, a great little menubar utility which keeps all this stuff close at hand. There are a lot of clipboard managers, but ShoveBox’s “Organize” window makes the difference. It allows all the clipping to be organized and colorized any way you like. This makes it real easy to track down that Subversion command for creating a branch you only use once or twice in six months – and then just drag-paste it into your terminal window.

Also, unlike many pure clipboard applications, ShoveBox allows you to create blank notes and put whatever you want in them. This is very useful when the text you want to paste is a combination of things – maybe some subversion commands follows by some Ruby on Rails commands – or maybe a signature for a BBS with contact information and a whitty quote.

Twenty-five dollars may seem a little steep for something like this, but the aggrivation it can save over the course of a few months is worth it. And there’s always the chance to get it at a bargain on one of the many Mac software daily sales.

Enter MyInfo 3, written by independant developer Milenix Software in Bulgaria.

This is one of the most solid pieces of software you will find. It does one thing and it does it exceptionally. You can quickly put together outlines of all kinds of data – passwords, serial numbers, project notes, web sites you’ve visited, the structure of your next novel … just about anything.

A couple of things stand out about My Info. One is the speed. While Outlook can take 20 seconds or more to launch and initialize all its various components, My Info is running in a couple of seconds. And it minimizes to the system tray when not in use, where it consumes very little memory. This is a pretty important feature as when you need to get at that snippet of information, or save one, you do not want to be waiting for the application to launch.

My Info supports having multiple documents open at once, something a lot of bookmark managers do not. It also supports a pretty robust editing mode allowing you to save just about any kind of content into an outline. Another nice touch is that the user can select what look&feel to display – Windows XP, Office XP, and a couple more. This follows one of the edicts for user interface design that I have always found to be true: "When in doubt, make it a user option."

The only shortcomings to My Info are the ability to import and export data. It would be nice to be able to transfer .CSV with Excel. But the uitility of MyInfo more than outweighs the need to transfer data stored in it to some other application. The price is right at only $50. Unlike many other PIM’s, this is one which will soon become indispensible.