Once I am done reviewing the application I plan to write a pretty lengthly review on the site. If you will be in the market for software like this keep checking back over the next month or so for my review.

What I can say right now at this moment is that I like the software so far. I am still early in the stage of entering transactions as they come up so I am sure I will run into some issues or even a feature that I really like. I was going to work with the beta version that they have out however I do not think it will work with my bank account because it is a Chase Pay Card and not a “typical” bank account.

Anyway stay tuned….

I will be away this weekend so if you try to contact me I will get back to you Monday.

So how do you earn points and just how many points does it take to get a reward?  Well everytime you run a search you will earn 1 point.  If you rate a search result positive or negative you will earn 2 points.  You can earn 3 points by leaving a comment about a particular result that you found to be good or bad.  The more points you rack up the better so the more active you are on Scour.com the better.  Now it does take 6,500 points just to get a $25 gift card but what other search engine would give you this?

Another good thing is that for every person you invite you earn 25% of the points they earn as well.  You will both collect points.  The more people you invite the faster your points will build up.  Be sure to go over to Scour.com and check out what they have to offer.  They have a nice UI which shows the rankings of the results on Google, Yahoo and MSN so you can always see where the results rank with the engines.  Since I always use Google I think I will be using Scour.com from now on.  I get the same results and can even be rewarded for doing my searches.  Why didn’t Google start this themselves?

The pricing structure is as follows:

• 10% 1-2 applications
• 30% off 3-4 applications
• 40% off 5-6 applications
• 50% off 7-8 applications
• 60% off 9-11 applications
• 75% off 12 or more applications

Currently they only have 28 applications listed on the site but I am sure this is bound to grow as time goes on. You also create your own bundle so it’s not like you are going to get software that you will never use. Buy only what you want and get discounts for buying multiple applications at once.

1. No Save All Command
   
   I am not sure about you however when I am working generally I have several files open in the editor at one time. I have been unable to find a command that will offer the save all functionality that I am used to. I would love to see a save all menu item integrated into a later version of Coda. This does not seem like a big deal but if you have 20 files open and edited you have to save them all individually rather than hitting one menu item or one keyboard short cut. It just tends to be a bit of a pain for me. In a response from Panic I was told that holding down the opt key while choosing save will give you a save all option.




2. No Close All Files Command
   
   I have been unable to find a command to close all of the opened files in a site that I am working on. I have found a work around but it is not the best way. I would love to see a close all files command added to a later version of Coda. Currently I have to right click on the tab of an open file and choose close others. I then have to close the remaining file that is left opened.




3. Unable to set Default view when opening Coda
   
   This is not a show stopper when it comes to using Coda, however it is a bit annoying. When I open Coda it always opens to the edit tab view of the interface with an untitled document open. It would be nice if I could make it open to the sites tab view rather than the edit file. I would like to open Coda and see all of my sites there ready for work. In the response from Panic they also told me that you can set the view in the general preferences pane. New windows open with?




4. Symbolic Link Issues
   
   I added a symbolic link to a directory, went back to the edit view in Coda and refreshed the directory. I noticed that I used the wrong path when creating the symbolic link so I had to go back into the terminal and delete the symbolic link and re-create it. After re-creating the link in the terminal I went back to the edit view and refreshed the directory. To my surprise the symbolic link did not reload. It still went to the old path from the first symbolic link created. It did not update the symbolic link in the file list until I actually restarted Coda.




5. F5 for Refresh
   
   While messing with the symbolic link stuff I noticed that there is only one way to refresh the file listing in Coda. You have to right click and choose refresh. It would be nice if I could click on a file and hit F5 to refresh the directory that I am viewing. Panic also told me that you can refresh a directory by pushing Command-R if the file list is active it will refresh.




6. Terminal Settings
   
   I noticed that when setting up a site the terminal portion of the application uses the same Remote Root as the site. It would be nice if I had the option to use a different Remote Root. I have setup my site to use a Remote Root that is for instance /home/jcrawford/projects/site/trunk/workspace/. This directory has symbolic links to different parts of the project such as the www, api, video, etc. When I open the terminal app i constantly have to cd .. before I can run any svn commands. This is because ./ is the svn root and not ./workspace/




7. Searching A Site
   
   I have been unable to find a way to actually search a site for a string. I am so used to having this ability. Open a search dialog, tell it to search all files in a site and have it return the files where the match was found. This is extremely helpful when it comes to finding strings in an entire project. I thing this is the biggest issue I have with Coda. It would be very nice to have this feature.




8. Loses Remote Connection
   
   I have noticed that with Coda if you leave the application open for a while still connected to a remote site and then return to use it you will have to close the application and then re-open it. Something happens with the remote connection when there is no activity because when I go to lunch and then come back trying to open a file results in an error from Coda. Every time I try to open a file I would get a dialog that says “write error” This happens until I restart the application. I am not sure if this is an issue with Coda or if this is an issue with SSH, however couldn’t Coda send a command to the site every so often to stop the timeouts?




9. Code Templates
   
   When using Zend Studio I got used to the code templates that they offered. You could go into the preferences and define a keyword such as ‘prdebug’ and you could have it use a specified set of code. In the editor when you type ‘prde’ it would pop up a dialog much like the ones for the PHP functions that would put code in your editor for you. I got used to the prdebug template that I created that would put nicely formatted print_r debugging commands in place. The code I had generated was
   
   echo ‘<pre>’; print_r($api_result); echo ‘</pre>’; exit;
   
   
   

10. Variable Detection
    
    In other editors that I have used if you do something like the following:
    
    $var = 1;
    
    Later in your code if you started to type ‘$va’ it would pop up the dialog box much like the php functions do that will allow you to choose the defined variables. If for instance you had $var1 and $variable defined the popup would allow you to choose either variable.




11. Active Line Highlighting
    
    It would be nice if Coda were to hilite the active line with a different color, a medium gray perhaps? This would make it very easy to detect where your cursor was at any given time.

These are all issues that I have found over the past few days. Now I am sure that I will find other issues and features that I did not know about at the time of this writing. I will not be doing another review on this application unless a new version is released. None of the drawbacks listed above are a total show stopper for me. Although I like the ability to search all files in a site I can just launch the terminal and grep or use Zend Studio to do my searching.

The team over at Panic really does know how to develop some great software. Their most well known application is Transmit an FTP application. I actually found that Coda uses the Transmit core for transmitting files to the remote servers. My personal thoughts on Coda are that it is a nice application and I will use it daily until I find an issue that is a total show stopper for me.

A few months ago I found the Mac Developer Network. They offer free podcasts for developers and now are also offering Video Training Courses. I was in touch with the owner of The MDN (Steve Scott - aka. Scotty) and was asking about the courses. He let me know that over the following week they were planning on launching the video training courses. The other day I noticed that they had posted the first 2 videos.

• Memory Management in Objective-C
• Adding Items to the Status Bar

I quickly purchased an MDN membership and both courses. If you are an MDN member you receive 50% off from all video courses that they offer. The one thing that I love about the MDN courses is that they are offered in several formats. You can download it in 1 full movie or you can download it where it is split up into chapters. Now the resolution for the video(s) is set to 1280 x 720 for viewing on your TV or computer screen. They also offer versions that are 480 x 272 which are made for the iPhone and iPod Touch. I have not been able to watch both of the courses yet however I have finished with the Memory Management course. I found this course to be very thorough showing examples of memory leaks and they also explain in detail why there is a leak and how to prevent it. After going over the 6 rules of memory management they show you how to find memory leaks using a new feature of XCode 3 called Instruments. They also show you how to find issues in your code where you release an object until the reference count is 0 and then try to access it again. They state that this can be a very pesky bug that a lot of people run into. They show you how to see the issue by using NSZombie and the console while your application is being run. I am not too sure how easy it will be to find the issue as all the console really told you was the memory address where the object was as opposed to where in your code you reference it.

Overall I found the pricing structure for the courses to be really quite affordable. The price of the memory management course is $9.99 for non MDN members and $4.99 for MDN Members. For $9.99 you get an 86 minute HD quality training course that is money well spent in my opinion. The price for the status bar item course is $4.99 for non MDN members and *only* $1.99 for MDN members. I am not sure how you could ever find quality training like this at such low prices. I look forward to seeing what other courses they release over time. I am not sure exactly how often they will be publishing but I believe I recall Scotty stating he was going to try to put out 1-2 new courses a month. Now as time constraints take place don’t hold me on this because things do tend to come up in everyone’s lives.

I found there to be a few issues in the video such as typos that were not corrected at any point in the video, it was just small things like this

NSString *string = [NSString alloc] initWithString:@”String 1″];

Notice that it is missing the first opening bracket. It was just small things like that which any beginner will pick up on. I am not that great with Obj-C yet but they were easy for me to catch. I have reported the issues that I found to maintainer however whether they will be fixed or not is their call. I am not sure what it would entail to fix a part of a video like that after it has been released.

Just to get back on point, I would *highly* recommend both the Aaron Hillegass book and the training courses offered by the Mac Developer Network. If you think that you will buy several courses in the future it might be very well worth the $25 yearly membership so that you can get 50% off the courses as they come out. Now just because I mentioned the membership to the site and the video courses being paid services the MDN actually has a lot of free stuff to offer to developers. They run several free podcasts that are free to subscribe to. Check out what they have to offer, it very well may benefit you.

I started using Coda about an hour ago for my work. I have been looking at all aspects of it and find it to be quite a nice tool and it almost replaces my other IDE. I do not do a lot of debugging in the IDE so losing that feature does not really worry me.

I like how you can setup different “sites” in Coda, if you click on the image to the left you will see a larger screen shot of what the “sites” view in Coda looks like. I have only added 2 sites so far so I am not sure there is any limit on how many sites you can manage within Coda. The options that they give you when adding a site are quite good. You can connect using the following protocols: FTP, SFTP, FTP with SSL (Implicit), FTP with TLS/SSL, WebDAV, WebDAV HTTPS. In the dialog for adding a site they ask you for the connection information, it also asks for your SSH login information if you require the Terminal portion of the application for the site that you are adding.

Using Coda to edit files could not be any easier than they have made it. You simply connect to your site, double click the file and you can see the source code for that file. As you can see in the screen-shot to the right Coda does support code suggestion for PHP programming. I noticed that it does not automatically insert the closing HTML tag when you start a tag as Zend Studio does but this is a small feature to live without. You can also see the clips section of Coda opened in the screen shot. It is a place where you can put frequently used code and either double click to add it to your document or drag and drop the clip in to insert the proper text. There are a lot of features to the editor, way too many to cover individually. However I do want to mention that you can share files using Bonjour and you can also turn on and off the line numbering. If you click the Gear below the editor window you will see quite a few options for you to choose from. The one thing that is not depicted in the screen shot is the ability for Coda to open image files. It opens them and shows the image unlike most editors that show the binary output of the image.

The preview section of Coda is pretty powerful as well. Not only does it give you a live preview but it has a javascript console as well that will help you when debugging those pesky javascript issues. The best part I think I like about the preview window is the ability to turn on the DOM hierarchy viewer. With this on you can hover your mouse over sections of the page and they will highlight blue. You can click the section if you need the outline to remain in place after you move your mouse out of the area. Under the preview it also shows you the trail of DOM elements to get to the highlighted point. This is a great feature when you are trying to debug html / js / dom issues. You can see in the image to the left that a portion of the page is highlighted blue, this is the DOM hierarchy inspector turned on and in use.

I think the CSS editing feature of the application is what makes me like Coda the most. Everything in the CSS is point and click. You just choose the options that you want and the css is generated for you. Now if you try to use the CSS Editor portion of Coda on a file that is not a CSS file, it will tell you that you are not using a valid CSS file. When I say you can pretty much do your CSS with pointing and clicking I mean it. There are so many options in this editor that makes it so easy it is unbelievable. CSS is not a strong point for me so this tool will come in very handy when it comes to having to adjust things that are powered by CSS. I will no longer have to wait for the guy who created the CSS to come online. I can make the fix pretty quickly myself. The CSS Editor offers many many options under the following categories: Text, Color & Background, Dimensions, Margins & Padding, Border, Lists, Layout, Tables and Printing. You will have to check out this feature is CSS is not your strong point because it will really come in handy. As you may see in the screen shot there is a column for the options you can edit but there is also a column that shows a preview of what every CSS element in the file will look like.

For those of you who spend most of your day in Terminal like I do it’s really nice that Coda offers a Terminal section so that you do not need to run multiple applications at once. You can edit a file and jump over to the terminal section to run your commands. It makes like really easy and I feel a bit “spoiled” by all of the nice features in this application. I am really happy that someone is out there working on an All-In-One tool like this for developers. I do have to admit I have seen nothing in the application pertaining to source control and that is a bit disappointing. However in my case it’s not a real issue. My employer has a development server setup in the offices and I can connect to it fine using SFTP. I make my changes, pop over to the terminal section and run my version control commands. It is a really quick process (even faster than working in Zend Studio) which surprises me.

As of this writing my feelings toward this application are very good. I look forward to putting this application to the every day test. As I have only been using it for a few hours I have not begun to find any real drawbacks to the application. I will put this to the every day test and then write another review of the product when my trial is expired.