Panic announced the 1.5 version of Coda yesterday, making a (kinda) huge leap from 1.1. The new version is full of good stuff for your favourite sexy powerhouse editor, including:
- Built-in version control. Yeah, you read that right. Commit, update and checkout to your heart’s content, all through Coda.
- Local multi-file search & replace. Amen.
- Custom books. Now you can add your own resources, complete with book cover image and all.
- Improved clips. You can now organize your clips in groups, as well as import and export them.
- You can now identify between local and remote copies of the same file at a glance, using the relevant icons.
- The almighty Sites are now sortable.
- A new action has been added, named “Reverse publish”, which allows you to download remote files to your local copy.
After hours I managed to set up version control with Coda, but mainly because I never sat down to do it properly, plus I had some permissions issues (as always).
The changes Coda 1.5 brings are all more than welcome, refreshing my idea of it quite a bit. Go Panic!
coda, panic, coda 1.5
It’s quite a long time that I’ve read Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman, Jr., but I never managed to write a proper review for this little gem of web design books. I think now is the time for proper credit.
DtO is a very pleasant and easy to read and use web design book, while at the same time is tons useful. The writing is simple and very pleasant, enriched with proper screenshots and relative images to avoid eye strain. The very size of the book is quite small – it’s not meant to be a bible, more of a handbook full of good advice.
It explores real-life web applications and sites to give you solid advice on information architecture, feature creep and simplicity in design. The book is relatively new and the examples are very current – so no stress there.
The author also establishes what I like to call the GTD methodology of design, calling it 5S. The 5S stands for five Japanese words starting from S, which are… Uhm, I think I shouldn’t spoil your fun.
What I really enjoyed were the Interface Surgery sections, where real-life problems met their solutions in a deductive way. Very useful indeed.
All in all, it’s a no-nonsense book that does everything that’s supposed to – and maybe a little more. I think it deserves a place somewhere in your web design / development shelf. It’s well worth its money.
designing the obvious, robert hoekman jr
EDIT: Mr. Rosenfeld was kind enough to offer a discount code for all Sugarenia.com readers: with the code SUGARENIA you get -10% while purchasing any of their books. Now is the time to get them, guys!
At first, I was kinda hesitant to go on and buy such a niche book – after all, what’s so exciting about coding and designing web forms?
Wrong.
Mr. Wroblewski’s book taught me that web forms are all kinds of designer fun, and this is not a euphemism. It’s just what the author says:
Forms make or break the most crucial online interactions: checkout, registration, and any task requiring information entry.
Imagine how many times you decided not to join a service just because of its scary registration form – or how many times you’ve mistakenly filled in your credit card number to a checkout form that didn’t support multiple formats of input.
Get the point?
Web Form Design is a simple, well-written book: it seems to have borrowed the blogging way of stating facts, and this is a good thing: simple, coherent writing, to-the-point explanations and the ubiquitous “Best Practices” list of points in the end of each chapter strike a chord: it’s a specialized blog turned book! That’s not too bad, is it?
Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski is a book highly recommended for interface designers, both on web and more traditional media. It can help everyone that wants to improve her skills in laying out inputs and textareas, and make you feel good too in the meanwhile.
You surprised me, mr. Wroblewski. Pleasantly, I might say. I think I’ll get Site Seeing too.
luke wroblewski, web form design, site seeing
