Coda 2

The following article is intended to be a top level overview of Coda 2 to help you decided whether or not to purchase it.

My first impressions:

The application has been literally renamed from “Coda” to “Coda 2”. While I can’t see a legitimate problem with this, it’s annoying to me because the application is still “Coda”, no one includes the version number in the application name. If they’re going to do that they should have Coda 2.x.x yada yada (which is obviously annoying). I don’t like this!
The new tabbing system was confusing. I didn’t understand why there was a “Files” tab.

At first it appeared that the left sidebar (directory and file browser) seemed to only browse local files. I spent ten minutes trying to figure out how to display remote because they move the remote/local tabs to the bottom right. I don’t like this!
It seems unusual, to me, that I can’t close that tab either so it’s using up space I’d otherwise use for all my tabs. I don’t like this! It just doesn’t seem practical.
The bar that previously contained the name of the project you were working on has been replaced with a tab that has a picture and name of the project with an eject symbol in the upper left. This would seem to be a better use of space but it identical to all other tabs making it difficult to differentiate it from the others when you’re moving around quickly. I don’t like this!
Additionally, they moved the application opening and closing icons to the left. I’ve noticed this is a shift in applications, I presume to use less real estate (if they’re horizontal they take up the whole line, if they’re vertical they share a line and take up way less space. This is a great idea, but it’s something that Apple needs to incorporate globally first, otherwise it’s just a difference between the applications that is disorienting.

A feature request I submitted to the Panic team (authors of Coda) was to add a tab for viewing additional remote servers. In Coda 1 they only allowed you to have a local and remote view, but it’s perfectly common to have multiple remote server locations (one for development and another for production – AKA “live”). This still hasn’t been integrated but they did introduce grouping on the Sites page. This eases some of that pain because I can switch from one sub project to another easily without mucking up my Sites section with “Site1 Development” “Site1 Production” “Site2 Development” “Site2 Production”. I kind of like this.
They also introduced an interface for version control with Git, this is a great move. So far it’s been a little buggy though, but I haven’t been abel to replicate any issues so I can definitively say there’s a problem. I love this.
With the revisions to the Sites page they also introduced a new effect when you edit a site. Instead of clicking Info and the page flips around, it rolls. Even on a 8GB 2.4 Intel Core 2 Duo with a SSD these animations are slow. Panic should know that developers are the last people who want animations! We’re trying to get stuff done as quickly as possible. They should at least provide an option to disable them! I don’t like this.
They updated the icon to be more photorealistic. I loved the old one, not that it matters at all really, but just saying! I don’t like this.

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