Billups Design

A couple weeks ago Macrabbit released the much anticipated Espresso 1.0 application. Its meant to rival the feature set of Panic’s Coda by being more or less a one stop shop for editing, uploading, and previewing Web files. Espresso doesn’t take on quite as much as Coda but what features they did do, they did with style.

It’s clear from the moment you open Espresso that the application is meant for web designers that code their own front ends. The sort of people that take good aesthetic design into their purchasing decisions. The welcome screen is a beautiful, albeit unnecessary, illustration that gives the introduction to all this application can do. Everything from the icon work to the UI panels in the application are simple yet there is a fine attention to detail. So much so that the team at MacRabbit even created their own monospaced font for the text editor. There are little subtleties that one up Coda and even my favorite editor at the moment, Textmate. The line numbers are very clear and seem as though they are part of the document without the need for extra spacing like Textmate. The code folding features is another great example that is tucked away until you hover over it and when you do you get another visually excellent feature implementation.

Although Espresso is trying to achieve the same end as Coda it goes about it in a very different way. Coda does things by projects which it stores on a dashboard screen. Once a project is open you see the ftp directories on the left and your files on the right. It makes editing things already on the server extremely simple and easy. Espresso differs from the edit on the server model quite a bit and I think it lends itself to better development practices. With Espresso Your work area is laid out to cater more towards local copies. You give Espresso a folder of files, or you can download the latest from the built in FTP client, and you work from there. The real genius comes into play when you have to upload your changes to the FTP server. Espresso has nifty Update, Merge, and Mirror functions that will keep track of what version of the file, your local copy or the server’s, is the newest and sync accordingly. This way you have a backup and a way to test without disrupting the live server, all without worrying about what files you’ve changed.

There are some problems with Espresso, and some of them exist even in Coda. The first one is page templates. I use TextMate as my primary text editor and whenever I’m starting out a new site the first thing I do is use TextMates XHTML Strict template. Doctypes are far too long to have to remember and code by had every time and although I can create a snippet for this in Espress and Coda, it’d be logical to include the full page template by default. The other issue I have with Espresso is how weak its snippet capabilities are. Espresso categorizes the snippets into System and User tabs, and no matter if I’m coding Javascript, HTML, CSS, or PHP my user snippet category is the same. I would love the ability to have my user snippets depend on the file I’m working with. I don’t need my custom XHTML Strict page template getting in the way of my WordPress Loop snippet. The final annoyance of Espresso is how it handles projects. I’m not saying they should copy Coda’s project dashboard, but if I take the time to set up the directory and add my FTP servers (sometimes multiple) then don’t make me hunt to find this project file on my hard drive every time I open the application. The Recent Items list only goes back so far and doesn’t cut it. Some sort of dashboard or projects splash window is a must.

So which is better? What application should you drop everything and start using to code web sites? Well my recommendation to you is that if you’ve already purchased Coda don’t buy Espresso. Both applications are executed very well and Espresso isn’t a clear enough winner to justify dropping Coda yet. If you’re not using either then its a good idea to download the demo versions of both. Both demos are fully functioning for 30 days and its probably a good idea to try out both of them for at least a week with a good amount of use before you decide. For most users that just need to edit text files and upload them to a server both applications are great and it’ll be the dozens of minor details that make your decision. If you’re a power user that needs SVN, Terminal, the visual CSS tools, powerful find and replace, then you’ll probably find Espresso lacking and want to go the TextMate or Coda route.

Last 5 posts by steve

• Frontend Optimization, pt. 5 - June 12th, 2010
• Frontend Optimization, pt. 4 - June 11th, 2010
• Frontend Optimization, pt.3 - May 27th, 2010
• Frontend Optimization, pt.2 - May 20th, 2010
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