Last week, as you may have heard, we shipped Coda 1.5, a majorminor™ update to our white-hot text editor that also happens to include a full visual css editor, a Terminal, web preview with DOM inspection, built-in reference books, handy clips for frequently used text, collaboration, and now Subversion and multi-file search/replace. Phew.

As the famous Dutch expression goes, this release was like a drunken chef's spekdikken — it took a bit of extra time to cook, but boy was it worth it! As the chef drunkenly added too much delicious metworst. Which in this case represents new features.

The 1.5 goals were simple:

1. Do some things that probably should have been in 1.0 (like Find Across Files).
2. Add some things people wouldn't expect from a 1.5 (like Subversion).
3. Make it free, like a big giant virtual hug to those who supported Coda, the new kid on the editing block, from day one.

With any luck, you're as excited about it as we are, and we hope it makes your websites more awesome.

Design

Two short UI stories I'll mention. First, "Find Across Files" was an interesting interface challenge. My initial impulse was to try to wedge a complete and separate files-only "Find / Replace" interface into the file browser itself — after all, you're finding in the files, and that's where the files are filed. It was not easy trying to put a giant, duplicate interface into a really small space. At one point even I tried putting the entire chunk in a pop-up bubble that would hover out of a button in the files header, but deemed it way to annoying to have it come and go. It was only after many fruster/iterations that I stepped way back and figured that we already had 80% of the interface pieces we needed to do multi-file find/replace — they were just over on the other side of the window, in the existing Find banner. By extending that Find banner to the left, and adding an area on top of the file listing that contains the file-specific settings, I think we were able to make the Find banner do efficient double duty with little GUI collateral damage. (As long as people find it.)

Second, some of you may notice that Coda's tabs now have nice little icons that indicate if an open file is saved locally or remotely. And some of you may not notice this at all. That's because the icons only show up if you have a mix of files, some local, some remote. In other words, they only show up when it's important/relevant to you. In an earlier beta build they were there all the time, but doing it as-needed seemed more elegant. (Even though we were a bit worried about UI consistency, in a "hey, where'd that thing go?" way. But no reports thus far.)

Cookies

But, to be honest, this post, like a lot of my life, is but a conduit for baked goods. Unearthing a folder from my giant "to blog" archives, I'd like to share with you these awesome Coda Cookies that were made earlier this year by Panic fans and cool kids Alexis Cordova and Sarah Bonk. I didn't get to eat them, but I did salivate over the e-mail.

I hope this trend of Panic Baked Goods does not end here.


Thanks to Sarah and Alexis for the cookies, and thanks to the Panic guys for working so very hard on Coda 1.5.

Most importantly, thanks to everyone who has downloaded, used, bought, and/or told their friends all about Coda. You're the best customers and marketing department a small software company could ask for!