Coda: We're Finally Live
If I’ve been a little hard to get a hold of recently, it’s because I had the distinct honor of being the first person to use Coda to build a “production” website. And it was a pleasure.
Cabel Sasser designed the site from head to toe, in addition to writing the magic javascript pixie dust that powers the horizontal scrolling preview box (who needs Flash, anyway?) and the thumbnail image-zooming we first unveiled with the Rip-Off Express about a year ago.
My main challenge was to turn all of Cabel’s rounded-corner/drop-shadowy/crazy-scrolling dreams into semantically-sound, standards-compliant xhtml. When I first saw his mockups and heard him describe this dynamically-scrolling preview box, I think I pooped my pants a little. I mean, this is why people build stuff in Flash — because HTML+CSS just ain’t there yet.
Somehow, with a surprisingly minimal amount of css-hackery and a liberal amount of Cabel’s javascript wizardry, we made it. It doesn’t quite validate (input type=“search” isn’t valid yet), and the layout still uses a couple of tables here and there — I spent 2 days just on that little gray pop-up download bubble, only to resort to sticking it in a table — but by and large, I think we can be happy with the way the site turned out. And apologies to those of you using Internet Explorer 6 and below; I did all I could to accommodate you, but a man has limits.
Of course, the real news today isn’t the site we spent the last three weeks building; it’s the incredible app we’ve spent the last year and a half bringing into the world. If you make websites by hand, Coda is truly revolutionary, and it’s totally changed the way I approach web design and site management. I would have cut off any one of several appendages to have had an app like this when I was freelancing. I remember the feeling of dread when I’d have to close all my browser tabs and TextWrangler and Transmit windows at the end of the day, knowing that it would be a tedious task to get back up and running when I started work again in the morning. But Coda remembers everything, so I all I have to do is double-click that gorgeous little leaf, and I’m ready to go.
Okay, enough already. Off to answer the 500+ e-mails1 in my inbox I’ve been neglecting for the last three weeks.
1 Note to my bosses: I don’t actually have 500 un-answered e-mails in my inbox, I promise. It’s more like 350. ;)