One week ago, I purchased Coda. No, it doesn’t have Subversion support. No, it doesn’t have fullscreen mode. What I did find, though, is a unique application that neatly organizes most of the tools I need to get web development done. A syntax-completing text editor, visual or textual CSS editor, terminal, and live web preview are among my most used tools, any of which can be swapped for another, or split into multiple views. With my preferred syntax coloring set up, Coda’s split tabs make me feel right at home, editing HTML and CSS side by side with a preview of the results just a click away.

Get Back to Work
Coda makes getting back into “the zone” really quite easy with its Sites feature, which keeps track of each project’s tab arrangement, FTP settings, public URL, and more. Double-click a Site to start working right where you left off. As for publishing, Coda leverages Transmit’s FTP engine, which keeps folders in sync between your computer and web host with little effort.

A Few Shortcomings
I often work with MySQL as my data store and use CocoaMySQL as a front-end, but switching applications goes against the one-window flow that Coda tries so hard to bring together, so I installed phpMyAdmin and just use it inside a Preview tab within Coda — couldn’t be simpler. The same goes for online documentation not covered by the built-in PHP and JavaScript references. For Subversion, I’ll just use command-line ’svn’ calls within a Terminal mode, as it’s surprisingly straightforward for a command-line utility.

Only the Beginning
As of this writing, Coda is just at version 1.1, so there’s plenty of room for it to grow (pun intended). At the very least, I hope to see fullscreen mode similar to NetNewsWire’s in the near future, so I can really get into my code and ignore little distractions like menu bar extras, Mail badges, etc. Panic has dropped their biggest application yet on the Mac web developer community, and overall, I’m very satisfied with Coda and am getting so much more done in so fewer windows.

Extra Goodies
Panic engineer Steven Frank posted some little Made with Coda web badges I made on his site. If you enjoy using Coda, share the love.

The one bit of circuitry in the whole system that makes me question the homebrew nature of these conversions is one tiny power-on board labeled “Marathon”, which connects to the relocated front panel board of the original tower. Several years ago, Marathon Computer offered rackmount conversion kits for Apple’s G3, G4, and even iMac systems. These enclosures happen to look an awful lot like their PowerRack kit, though pictures and documentation are now extremely sparse. I’m interested to hear from anyone familiar with their products if these are in fact Marathon cases, or just re-used parts in a mostly custom Mac system.

To keep the system and its veritable wall of hard drives running cool and trouble-free, large fans were employed in conjunction with a simple, off-the-shelf fan controller which combines the feedback from multiple fans into one monitoring port, complete with overheating alarm and adjustable temperature settings (via jumpers).

For completeness, a SCSI card and stealth serial port were added, leaving room for ProTools PCI audio cards. In its day, this was a screaming system that bested even Apple’s top PowerMac offerings, and would still make for a fairly respectable server today. Someone clearly spent many hours getting the physical layout and electrical systems “just right”, which I thought was well worth preserving and sharing.

The new administration system now sports a minimalist and streamlined look without skimping on the options you’ve already come to know and love. The oft-ignored Dashboard screen has been refined to a now usable level, and the Manage section has seen a nice overhaul as well. For newcomers, the controls are far less intimidating, but all the bells and whistles seasoned bloggers need are still easily within reach.

Keeping WordPress itself up to date is sometimes a hassle, but any plugins you employ also need periodic replacement. With WordPress 2.5, plugins can be upgraded right in place, though WordPress itself continues to only notify you of available updates. Still, the feature is a very nice touch for those who use several plugins like the spam-defending marvel that is Akismet, Google Sitemaps, and so on.

From a reader’s perspective, the new version offers improved speed. One of my biggest gripes about WordPress is how it tends to buckle under a heavy load, and it appears that the new version will be able to dispatch content to visitors’ browsers much faster than before, reducing the workload when under stress from a Digg or Slashdot stampede to a particularly popular post.

Overall, WordPress 2.5 is a highly recommended upgrade for anyone currently operating a blog, and a must-have for those of you still on the fence. What are you waiting for? Get WordPress and get writing!

A day ago, I stumbled upon the answer I was looking for on the Learning jQuery blog: a browser-ready jQuery-loading bookmarklet. For the uninitiated, a bookmarklet is a standard bookmark placed in your Bookmarks Bar, except it runs some JavaScript code instead of pointing your browser at a web destination. In this case, the bookmarklet manually fetches and inserts jQuery into the current page. I’ve modified the following version slightly to flash “jQuery Loaded” on the page when the load is complete, using the just-loaded jQuery, naturally.

To install the tool, just drag the following link to your Bookmarks Bar, and click it to temporarily install jQuery on whatever page you’re visiting: http://www.command-tab.com/2008/03/02/photoshop-tip-zoom-while-transforming/ When you use Adobe Photoshop day in and day out, certain things about its interface and workflow start to grate on you, like the inability to zoom while in the middle of a transform or applying Layer Effects. Much to my delight, Photoshop is also jam packed with hidden commands and modifier keys, which turned up a discovery today, shown here: