Panic’s New App Coda: Finally!
I read a review of Panic’s new app Coda and thought, “Finally! Somebody is figuring out how to help us web developers out!” I’ve used TextMate, skEdit, BBEdit, Dreamweaver, GoLive, Eclipse and even the old-school applications like Adobe PageMill to make my web sites, but there have been features missing, lots of toggling through files and all. It seems Panic, the masterminds behind my favorite FTP program Transmit, crafted the application that will finally give me what I’ve been hoping for.
My Issues that up-and-coming web developers need to know
Life in PHP, MySQL, HTML, CSS and all that is great. Lots of free, open source stuff out there to get into the web development world. But you may realize that coding everything by hand can take too long. So you begin to borrow from other people by going to HotScripts and such sites that host free PHP scripts. You browse a lot of blogs to learn the tools of the trade to craft HTML and CSS, maybe by visiting the CSS Zen Garden.
An issue I have with all this is that in the end, you almost always come back to doing it yourself. A magic program like Dreamweaver cannot promise to make web development purely a graphical enterprise. You always have to come back to the code because, frankly, the web browsers are to blame. And the HotScripts you use can’t do it exactly the way you need it to be.
Once you come to this realization, like all the rest of us have at some point, you will need to dive deeper into the world of development. Let me make a recommendation at this juncture for you: buy Panic’s Coda and use it first.
It’s an all-in-one program that facilitates building web sites to standard, not an iWeb program that makes it easy, but produces little customization, or a Dreamweaver program that renders pages all outta whack (which visually becomes almost worthless and just like any other editor out there). You’ll spend around 80 bucks for a program that puts everything there, and even has built in books of handy HTML, CSS, Javascript, and PHP references. I personally favor the program much more than dropping 500 bucks for a GoLive or Dreamweaver kind of program.
So there’s my review. You’ll enjoy having the FTP in there; easy access to editing pages; CSS up-to-standard editors that are visually wonderful; multiple-site synchronization; and the clean environment that’s not clunky or disturbing.
Typing
A message to the world:
We now use computers.
Perhaps you learned to type on a typewriter. Or perhaps you learned from someone who had learned on a typewriter. Perhaps it’s just that you somehow, inexplicably escaped the news that computers are different than typewriters (kind of like how I never realized Whitney Houston was singing about the greatest love of all, and not a gray test…). At any rate, you need to know something very, very important:
You need only press the spacebar ONCE after a period.
If you need a moment to process that news, please do. :) But, be assured, this news is no joke. It is 100% true. Accurate. Fair and balanced. You see, back in the old typewriter days, two spaces after a period made some sense. I suppose it makes a sentence look a little nicer to have a bit more space between it and another sentence than is merely between words. This is why computers were designed to lengthen that space automatically. Ah, yes. See, this is why computers are better than typewriters—they do extras for us.
Consequently, it is now no longer appropriate, aesthetic, or reasonable to press the spacebar twice after a period. Doing so only creates a tremendously huge, jarring, ugly white spot on your paper—over and over and over again. Huge white spots everywhere! Olympic long jumps just to get from the end of one sentence to the beginning of the next! If you are an abuser of the spacebar, please protect the beauty of your product and the sanity of your reader by curbing your spacebar addiction. You might even find that it has benefits for yourself as well! You’ll save time. You’ll promote hand health by pressing fewer keys. And, you might not notice a difference at first, but your eyes and mind will be more at ease as you proofread your own work. More than anything, you’ll be able to rest comfortably with the sweet assurance that yes, you finally belong with a computer. Welcome. :)
If you choose to ignore this public service announcement, at the very least, please…. Get a typewriter. :)
(Written by Auburn and Matt Williams, available on their password-protected site wmsgotsoul.com.)
Sweet, Lovely Fonts
I’m a freak for good fonts. I love a sweet typeface. However, there’s little I loathe more than redundancy with fonts (e.g. Times New Roman *blech!* and Zapfino). Recently I discovered a couple of fabulous sites that boast either great advice or great freebies:
exljbris has high-quality fonts for free. You gotta get your hands on Delicious at least.
Cameron Moll’s blog post on good fonts has some excellent referrals from other designers that I found helpful.
Let me make a plug for Serlio. You may have noticed that lovely Trajan Pro is on the rise. If we’re not careful, it may become like Zapfino or Times New Roman: fonts that everyone uses for almost everything. Now, Trajan is much too slick to become too ugly on the eye, if it becomes redundant. But certainly the trendy-ness can render it not unique. Serlio has become, for me, a great alternative when looking for the Trajan look and feel without using Trajan itself.
