Coda: Some Thoughts

Coda is a pretty good application for web development and it's also fairly polished for a version 1.0 piece of software. However it's not excellent, and there are a couple of quirks which annoy me enough to write this:

Quirks/Annoyances

1. Comment Completion

   

   Firstly, I must say that the source code hints in Coda is pretty good most of the time. They are exactly what a programmer expects from an IDE; and being linked into the Books aspect of Coda is very neat. But why does it try and complete my comments?!?! Argh! That's really annoying! As a quick comparison Apple's Xcode does not provide code completion in comments, and additionally provides completion of user function names. Admittedly Coda is still wet behind the ears in comparison being only a version 1.0 release.

2. Uploading to "Current Folder"

   

   I'm not sure if this is a bug, or intended behaviour, but... If you create a new file in Coda, in a directory that exists both locally (obviously) and remotely, then once you're ready upload the file. Wouldn't you expect it to be uploaded to the same path on the remote server? I certainly would, but it doesn't, it goes to the "current folder", which probably isn't the directory you want. For example, I tend to expand subfolders, in the File Browser, rather than navigating into them, meaning that my current folder is always my website root.

3. Marked for Publishing / Tracking differences

   Whenever you save a file, Coda marks the file ready for publishing with a little icon next to it in the File Browser. But, how often do you save a document, even though you haven't actually changed anything? Tapping <CMD>+s is like a knee jerk reaction - we do it all the time, and then it gets a bit tricky to differentiate between files that actually need to be uploaded and those that don't. True, I can "publish all", but what if you're editing a file that you don't want uploading yet? You can turn on "track changes" which shows changes, but relative to what? It's not since it was last saved, or published, so... relative to when the marks were last cleared? Umm, I'm not sure I like that.

Feature Requests

I'm sure the people at Panic are working on all manner of bug fixes/new features, and I doubt we'll see an update for Coda for a while, but here are some features I'd really like to see in Coda:

1. File comparison

   With regard to the last item in the quirks/annoyances, I think that the marked for publishing, should basically check if there is a difference between the local version and the remote version. That makes sense, although implementing it would be tricky, as one would want to avoid polling the remote server all the time.

2. Versioning

   Kinda related to the above, I'm sure I'm not the only person who uses a versioning system for their web related source code. Support for Subversion and CVS would be awesome - that would make the item above much easier, as you've got a versioning tool already in place.