Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

As another commenter noted, the claim is more that Coda was the first "one app for all": a built-in text editor, FTP client, real-time previewer, site manager, and terminal.

Even so, as much as I like Panic, I don't know if I'd quite support that claim. Dreamweaver did a lot of those things sans the terminal, even if it did a lot of them less elegantly. (And I'm sure someone will explain how Emacs could technically have done all this since 1953 or whatever. I kid, I kid!)

Having said that, I'm still interested in seeing what they manage to come up with. I admire their products even when I don't regularly use them. (This includes Coda.)

View on HN

Allaire Homesite did pretty much all of that in 1996—code editing, browser previews, site management, FTP client.

I confess my memories of Homesite are pretty dim at this point, even though I used it professionally for a few years. I recall it as being notably worse at the non-editing parts of that than Coda is, but still, credit where it's due.

(Semi-funny anecdote: when I switched to the Mac around 1999 or so, I emailed Allaire--this was before Macromedia bought them--and asked if there would ever be a Mac version. They wrote back nicely enough to explain that they really couldn't do one because it was written in Delphi, which had no Mac version, but that I should consider looking into BBEdit. I still use BBEdit regularly to this day.)

I still use HomeSite+ in a Windows XP virtual machine as a CFML editor. I know it's an embarrassingly outdated piece of software, but I'm familiar with it and every attempt to migrate to something newer failed. I do use BBEdit for CSS and XCode for ObjC, it's just that HS+ styles and autocompletes CFML in a familiar way.)

If you think it's crazy to run a whole VM to edit text files, consider that as it uses half a gig of memory, can load from cold to an editable window in a few seconds, and the UI is hilariously snappy, running an XP VM is competitive with running Eclipse. And that is saying something.

Much like George R.R. Martin who still uses WordStar for DOS, it's just the consequence of what we're comfortable with—and who cares what tools you use as long as the output isn't compromised.

CF Studio (Homesite's big brother) was my first thought. I used it for 10+ years before switching to OSX and even that Mac switch was many years ago. I'd guess CF Studio has been around for ~20 years and had FTP, site management, datasource interaction, etc.

PageMill is a contender too, from 1995. Dreamweaver in 1997. I remember using both of those in one of my first jobs.

PageMill doesn't have a real site manager, it only has a sidebar that shows the files of a folder, but doesn't know anything about the site's structure. It is really just a notch above Netscape Composer.

I looked at Coda and thought it was targeting a very specific one person shop type developer. Like the type of person who wanted SASS and minifiers and all that good stuff, but didn't want to deal with NPM and gulp/grunt/webpack/etc, and just a button to push to go live.

The issue is the competition is a bunch of free Github project templates, and that git workflows are standardized now. (Plus I've been using Macs since the cro magnon era and VS Code works great for me despite not being "native"). So I'm interested what they come up with but I'm suspecting it will target a very specific workflow & type of customer.

Quite likely. Coda is great at what it does, but it doesn't integrate with version control systems, which is a fatal flaw at this point. I suspect that's going to be addressed in the next version, but I'm curious how "general" they're planning to make it. Another commenter theorized Panic might be setting it up to be more of a Webstorm competitor than a VS Code competitor.

Heck, I remember Microsoft FrontPage doing at least some of this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com