waffle

ssp writes about Coda’s Books feature, the only real stinker in Coda.

I must make this painfully clear: I love Coda. That said, I hate the books feature. It’s amazingly slow and the books are outdated. I have tried to use them several times, and I ended up just opening a Preview split and going to the PHP site or the closest HTML/CSS reference instead.

In fact, the actual books available seems like a caricature of what would ship with a Windows-based cheap ripoff of Coda. The CSS, JavaScript and HTML books all reference Netscape 6 and 7, and Internet Explorer 4 thru 6. The PC versions of them. Not Safari. Not Firefox. Not Opera. All browsers referenced have been obsoleted by their manufacturers. This is a fucking joke. (Especially for such a competent application.)

Not to mention that the Books mode is all wrong from the start.

Imagine this. You type substr in your JavaScript file. Not only does the autocomplete bubble show up, offering up substr and substring, but selecting either one shows an adjacent, connected box with a short abstract, a ‘read more’ button invokable with a keyboard shortcut (which will open a new split with the help) and the format of the function call.

The thing that makes this so frustrating is that this is partially implemented. Showing the Hints strip down at the bottom actually makes something like this work, except that it sticks to the last function you typed. (Which reminds me – why does the PHP-HTML mode insist on start out in PHP mode?)