Sausage, Songs and Software¶
I wanted to go and see a small gig tonight but a friend invited me for a barbecue. So I went to that barbecue, reckoning that if things are as usual the gig which was scheduled to begin at 9 won’t start before 10:30 anyway. When making it to the café around that time, my expectations were exceeded and there was time for plenty of chatting before things started.
The band playing were Levelload with a bass a guitar and some beat machines. While I am not the biggest fan of electronic music I like these mixes of electronic and ‘real’ music. Unfortunately there was a problem with the wiring, PA or suchlike for at least half of their time playing which made them a bit frustrated and sounding muddled – letting us only hear the very end of the set properly. And it wasn’t bad.
While I was out enjoying myself, the Mac software world also saw the fun hours of the Apple Design Award submission day. Which not only brought us Sandvox 1.2 that finally includes actual improvements to the application rather than mere bug fixes – a hooray for header image replacement!
We also saw the introduction of Panic’s Coda which – for all practical purposes – I’ll describe as forging my favourite file transfer client and text editor into a single window. This really deserves a more detailed review, but my impressions are that the application’s core features are great (combining my favourite tools after all), particularly as it adds a rather kick-ass completion feature (fast and with a dictionary that’s dangerously close to perfect in many situations). The rest is so-so: I find the included books neither fast nor good, the graphical CSS editor is far from being revolutionary and I found it to be incomplete for non-trivial real-world CSS editing and finally I don’t even have Terminal access on our server. With only a small number of bookmarks, I really like the superfluously pretty bookmark listing, though:
What seems the most critical to me in Coda is its single window approach. Not only is that not particularly Mac like, it also keeps me from getting the most of it as its limitation of my usage to tabs and splits keeps me from easily comparing files or seeing more than a tiny bit of a preview unless I have a huge screen. SubEthaEdit’s web preview is better in that respect. – Talking about which, yes, Coda is using the real SubEthaEdit text engine complete with remote editing features (and a lack of Undo in that situation) and improved matching of brackets. The engine can be licensed now.
