neongreen.com

When I saw that Panic released Coda early this week, I had to try it. If it was any other software company, I might not have even bothered. I’ve been a using their FTP client, Transmit, for two years and couldn’t be more pleased.

It immediately hit me that Coda could be the only program I need to work on my websites. File management, text and css editing, reference, a terminal, and web preview are all there.

Granted, this isn’t the first program to incorporate all of these features. Dreamweaver comes to mind, as do several text editors with FTP capabilities. What’s different is how easy Coda is to use.

Coda feels natural, comfortable, and uncluttered. It’s the program I didn’t realize that I’ve been wanting since I stopped using Dreamweaver several years ago.

Panic’s sums up Coda with the slogan: “one-window web development.”

After just a few minutes I was convinced that Coda rocks. After a few hours of coding I was sold.

I heard about TextExpander a couple of years ago, but forgot about it until this weekend. I’ve been doing a lot more emailing than usual and sending tons of stock responses, which gets tedious. Even though copying and pasting from past emails worked okay, it was really slow.

What TextExpander does is allow you to set up abbreviations for frequently-used text and images. It’s perfect for email signatures, driving directions, copyright statements, etc. There are also snippets that can be downloaded to speed up HTML coding and even fix common spelling errors on the fly.

I downloaded the trial and purchased it almost immediately. It’s my new favorite OS X utility.