As I put together my first major posts on my current major projects, and of course many side projects, I thought I would take the time to write what may end up sounding like a proposal about the program I use to code all my projects. So good is it that I choose to develop purely on a mac as there is, as yet, no windows version or equivalent. Software that is so good that I gladly, rather than begrudgingly, pay for it.

Developed by Panic who started out making it for their own coding team Coda is a robust code editor without the unnecessary clutter of most packages today. Designed for people who are dedicated towards hand coding every modicum of their website, Coda relinquishes any possibility of coding your site in any live-preview based design window and relies solely upon a single glorified version of notepad. Built into this is a powerful FTP client, now with subversion support, that tracks your changes and publishes them all in one go.

Add into this the functionality of the mac, such as: two finger gestures for changing between open tabs, simple scrolling and the initially confusing but eventually understandably prefreable folder listing style. I find my productivity is massively increased when working with Coda on my mac, simply because its just you and a big window of code. You don’t have to concentrate on what file your working on, whether it needs uploading, which project your working on as its all managed by the program itself.

Coda shines brightly as a sign that simplicity is still one of the best ways to make a product today. If you have not tried it yet, do so. Panic offer a lengthy free trial with full functionality so I urge you, of course if you have a mac, to go and try it. Development made simple. I look forward to comments on this, most likely a mixture of ‘I use Coda and I love it’ or ‘I use this and it does all that, better, and more’, we shall see.