Coda was a commercial and proprietary

web development Web development is the work involved in developing a website for the Internet (World Wide Web) or an intranet (a private network). Web development can range from developing a simple single static page of plain text to complex web applications, ...

application for

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, developed by Panic. It was first released on April 23, 2007 and won the 2007 Apple Design Award for Best User Experience. Coda version 2.0 was released on 24 May 2012, along with an

iPad The iPad is a brand of tablet computers developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple that run the company's mobile operating systems iOS and later iPadOS. The IPad (1st generation), first-generation iPad was introduced on January 27, 2010. ...

version called Diet Coda. Although formerly available on the

Mac App Store The Mac App Store (also known as the App Store) is a digital distribution platform for macOS apps, often referred to as Mac apps, created and maintained by Apple. The platform was announced on October 20, 2010, at Apple's "Back to the Mac" eve ...

, it was announced on May 14, 2014 that the update to Coda 2.5 would not be available in the Mac App Store due to sandboxing restrictions. Coda was discontinued in 2020 and replaced by Nova.

Concept and idea

The concept for Coda came from the web team at Panic, who would have five or six different programs for coding, testing and reference. The lack of full-featured website development platforms equivalent to application development platform

Xcode Xcode is a suite of developer tools for building apps on Apple devices. It includes an integrated development environment (IDE) of the same name for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It w ...

served as the purpose for Coda's creation.

Development

Currently, little is known about the actual development of Coda. What is known from Panic co-founder Steven Frank's blog is that Coda development started at Panic sometime in late 2005. Assigned to the project were 5 engineers, 3 people on support and testing, one designer, and one Japanese localizer.

Sections

The application is divided into six sections (Sites, Edit, Preview, CSS, Terminal, and Books), which are accessed through six tabs at the top of the application. Users can also split the window into multiple sections either vertically or horizontally, to access multiple sections or different files at the same time.

Sites

In Coda, sites are the equivalent of "projects" in many other applications like TextMate. Each site has its own set of files, its own FTP settings, etc. When Coda is closed in the midst of a project and then reopened, the user is presented with exactly what it was like before the application was closed. Another notable feature is the ability to add a Local and Remote version to each site, allowing the user to synchronize the file(s) created, modified or deleted from their local and remote locations.

Files

Coda incorporates a slimmed down version of the company's popular FTP client, Transmit, dubbed "Transmit Turbo". The Files portion is a regular

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

, SFTP, FTP+SSL, and

WebDAV WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for conc ...

client, where the user can edit, delete, create, and rename files and folders.

Plug-ins

Coda 1.6 and later supports plug-ins, which are scripts usually written in command line programming languages like Cocoa,

AppleScript AppleScript is a scripting language created by Apple Inc. that facilitates automated control of Mac applications. First introduced in System 7, it is currently included in macOS in a package of automation tools. The term ''AppleScript'' may ...

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

, or even shell scripting languages like bash, that appear in Coda's menu bar and do specific tasks like appending URLs or inserting text at a certain point. Plug-ins can either be written using

or through Panic's free program, the Coda Plug-in Creator.

Command-line utility

Coda does not come with its own command-line utility. Instead, a third-party utility such as coda-cli can be used.

Reviews

Coda 1

Coda 1 received a review of 3.5/5 mice from

Macworld ''Macworld'' is a digital magazine and website dedicated to products and software of Apple Inc., published by Foundry, a subsidiary of IDG. History ''Macworld'' was founded by David Bunnell and Cheryl Woodard (publishers) and Andrew Fl ...

. It received 4/5 stars from CNET's Download.com.

Coda 2

Coda 2 received a rating of 4.5/5 mice from Macworld.

References

External links

Panic - Coda
{{HTML editors HTML editors FTP clients SSH File Transfer Protocol clients Shareware Panic software MacOS programming tools MacOS text editors 2007 software