Edit (05/02/07): Today Panic released Coda 1.0.1, a revision that addresses a number of issues I was having (e.g., no more garbage characters, and no more SBOD!). The list of fixes and improvements is as long as my arm, but it’s worth checking out in case you were wondering whether you should buy the application. Because my problems were addressed with this release, I decided to register the application after all. How’s that for responsive development? Great job, Panic.
Edit (04/26/07): I’ve decided not to purchase Coda at this time. I’m simply having too many problems with garbage characters rendering in the editor and with the SBOD to consider it seriously. I’ve sent support e-mails to the folks at Panic, who understandably, have their hands quite full at the moment. Still, the fact remains that after two such messages, I’ve not received a solution to my problem or any follow-up inquiries. I’m not giving up on Coda completely, and may change my mind after the 1.1 or 1.5 revision, whenever it becomes available.
Steven F., one of the developers at Panic Software, offers a very timely Coda tip which directly addresses my “no basic HTML tag snippets” criticism:
The first thing I recommend doing is turning on the symbols pane. This is done by clicking the icon at the bottom of the file browser that looks like a pair of curly brackets.
This will show you all the “symbols” in the current editor document, as determined by the current syntax mode, and allow you to jump to any of them by simply clicking.
Symbols include things like H1-H6 headers in HTML mode, function and class declarations in PHP mode, CSS elements, and more.
I’ll concede the point, but I still maintain that this needs to be easier to find. Curly brackets are used to denote CSS selectors, not HTML tags. And it still isn’t a repository of basic HTML tags - only those tags that are found within the current document. In other words, if you’re creating an HTML document from scratch, you still don’t have a palette/window that provides one click access to tags.
