The Return of One-Click Web Publishing
Back in the golden era of the internet (read: the mid-nineties) before web design was complicated by fancy acronyms like AJAX and CSS, publishing your website was fairly simple. You wrote your HTML in notepad, uploaded it with your favorite FTP client and you were done. Now that web design almost surely includes at least half a dozen other technologies, many web designers will have half a dozen programs open like a couple browsers, an FTP client, one or more text editors (sometimes one for each language you’re writing!), a terminal program, maybe a couple source code references as well. That’s a lot of overhead for making a webpage.
Panic Software, from Portland, Oregon, felt the same way too. The UI gurus there have built an integrated AJAX development environment for OS X that elegantly combines a text editor, HTML preview, FTP manager, terminal window, CSS editor, and integrated HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP reference.
Panic is a small, agile software company that has over the years established itself as a powerhouse in the Macintosh software industry with such hits as Audion (the best MP3 player & encoder for OS9), Transmit (the best FTP program on any platform), CandyBar (the most complete Icon management program) and Unison (recipient of two Apple Design Awards in 2004 – Best Mac OS X Product (runner up) and Best Mac OS X User Experience (winner)). If you’re a 14th level AJAX ninja this software may not be for you but the other 95% of web developers out there will probably appreciate the convenience it offers. Like everything Panic builds, it’s clean, elegant and simple. Oh, and it’s Mac-only.
12 September, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Annotation: Panic Coda has won the same award Unison won – Apple Design Award 2007 Best Mac OS X User Experience (winner). It’s also been awarded a perfect score from MacUser and SoftPedia. Congratulations Panic!
13 September, 2007 at 3:16 pm
I have a few clients that this would have been a *perfect* recommendation for… save the Mac-only stipulation.
24 February, 2008 at 3:16 pm
I’ve actually found for some reason it doesn’t save the line endings correctly (saves them as Windows and not unix. Its really weird since its selected and thats the standard. Also wish they would add support for Adobe’s checkout mechanism since majority of our developers are using Dreamweaver. Oh well, its pretty f*ing great otherwise.