Don't panic and dunno

Panic recently released two divergent upgrades to Coda, their all-in-one web-app programming app and my go-to tool for PHP, HTML, javascript and CSS for years. First up is Coda 2, a Lion-requiring update. Coda 2 changes some of the ways that Coda worked while building on the old philosophy in a way that makes it pretty seamless but nicer to work with. They've added a way to access MySQL databases from within Coda and examine them in various way for example - you can examine and edit the structure of tables, the contents, run queries and more. It's not actually much different to having a browser window open to do the same things, except it's just there in another tab which is very pleasant and encourages use of Coda more or less full screen. And, actually, I think I prefer the layout the Coda way to the phpMyAdmin way, and definitely prefer it to running MySQL over telnet. Although it offers lots of other potential changes to improve workflow, there are two more that I really appreciate and remember. First is code folding - you can find a scope defined by curly brackets and "fold" it (or, indeed all scopes at the same level if you wish). This collapses the scope to a button with an ellipsis on it that you click to restore the code. Obviously it would be ideal to not have code that's miles long and need this, but in practise, even in relatively short bits of code, it works out to be nice to do this and focus clearly on the problem areas. It would be lovely if they'd added scope detection from colons to end statements too but we can't have everything. Second is visual editing of style sheets. It's not there for everything (and doesn't make sense for everything of course), but for quite a few CSS terms (background, border etc) there's a choice for a flyout visual editor. You can set RGB and RGBA values from a colour picker directly. You can pick border styles from a drop-down, slider and colour picker (for style, thickness and colour) and see them demonstrated right there. Very nice! All the old autocomplete and describe syntax goodness is there too. Not quite as nicely done as in xCode perhaps (but Coda does support a lot more languages and coding styles) but still nicely done. One thing that's quickly become so useful it's hard to believe it wasn't always there is variable and function name completion. If you've got a variable called $tidalRange say, or a function in the script calucateTidalRange($springHigh, $springLow) then when you start typing $ti… or cal… then your variables and functions are available for autocompletion. It certainly encourages longer, descriptive variable names!

Next up is Diet Coda. Diet Coda is an iPad app. You can, surprisingly comfortably, edit code directly from your iPad. I wouldn't fancy it as my only solution, although with my zaggFolio keyboard it would be pretty workable without a main computer I think, and you can also use your iPad for a direct view of the page you're editing in Coda as you do it - a feature I thought I would use but haven't because the previewing in Coda 2 works at least as nicely as it did in Coda. Diet Coda has joined the little library of moderately expensive iOS apps I've bought. It remains to be seen if it's worth the money for me long term but I have used it to tweak little bits of code successfully and it's not an outrageous price if that's all I use it for in future. It does good syntax highlighting, an intuitive workflow and if you're using the iPad's on-screen keyboard it adds a context sensitive extra row of keys - things like (, ) and $ and ; are easily available, although {, }, [, ], -, = and > are still tucked away a bit. One extra feature they've introduced that I find myself hoping Apple and everyone else will adopt is the "magnified line." Touching and holding evokes a magnifier, just anyone used to an iOS device will be used to. However it intelligently magnifies the whole line which makes sliding your finger to a new insertion point really rather easier than in anything else I've seen.

Finally there's Dunno. Dunno is an iPhone/iPad/Mac app. You type in what you don't know and it goes off and researches it for you. I'm guessing this is a mix of wikipedia and google search results. What it does do nicely is sync across devices, you can enter new terms anywhere and pick them up anywhere else. That could be its saving grace for me, the ability to think 'oh, I need to look that up' while sitting in one place and knowing that I need it in the other, stick it into Dunno and pick it up there later. You also get a nice list of things you've looked up. It is, of course, editable, but if you've looked something up to see if it's possible and then want to keep it to use it later, that's very much there from the start. All that said... it feels a bit like a niche app to me although given the price point (free for everything) it's definitely priced right for a niche. What is definitely nice on both systems it that it's all in one place - you type your search and you get a list under that of old searches (with a date reference), in an adjacent column you get a list of the returned results. If you click on those, the whole thing jumps to the right... so the list of search results is on the edge and the second column becomes a web browser displaying the linked page. This page will do pretty much what you'd expect - I've just watched a YouTube tutorial on iPad programming that way for example. Add to that the fact it strips out the adverts and while it's pretty clearly slower than doing it yourself, it does add enough functionality to make it interesting and possibly a long-term keeper.