Coda is a text-editing, CSS-styling, WebKit previewing, file-managing, FTPing, terminal-accessing, web-site-building and publishing application for the Macintosh.

And, Coda has no duct tape.

All Inclusive Applications

If you are going to write an application that has and does “everything” there are a few key dynamics you have to keep in mind.

First of all you need to make it easy, simple and clear for the user to do all their work in your “one window”. This is where usability and interface make or break the application. And, fortunately for Coda, this is where Panic excels in, and Coda does a superb job as a “one-window application”.

Before Coda I always had at least three windows open at any given time when doing web-design: Transmit, TextWrangler and Safari. And I know that for those who are more web-design and development savvy people than I, only three apps open would be like a vacation.

For the past several weeks as I’ve been writing this article I have used nothing but Coda for web designing, and it has broken my age-old habits of CMD+TABbing between multiple apps.

Using Coda’s one-window interface has been especially wonderful when I am away from my home office and thus coding on my 12″ PowerBook’s 1024×768 screen resolution. But even on my 23″ display at home, I prefer to have Coda’s window sized to about 85% of my screen and make use of the Text Editor and the Preview panes rather than have two apps running side-by-side at 45% screen-realestate each.

Another reason Coda has helped break my habit of multiple-app web designing is the way it saves your previous work session, but more on that later.

Coda’s use of tabbed windows plays a critical part in its claim to fame as a one-window tool. Nowadays tabs come standard with good apps. Therefore, just having tabs is not enough. You have to have tabs that are above the norm of other applications and which meet the user’s expectations. Especially when it’s the tabs which are part of the foundation of your “one-window” application.

There seem to be three major ingredients which make up a good tabbed-window interface. First is design. One of the reasons I have never used NetNewsWire’s built in browser is the slighly odd look and feel of the tabs. They just feel clunky to me. Coda’s tabs are clean, subtle and easily identifiable. They are intelligently placed, and don’t go weird places when you have 20 of them open. (Though if you have 20 tabs open, you probably have bigger things to worry about than tab placement.)

The second ingredient is navigation. If you’re working in tabs you must be able to get from one to the other quickly and easily. Coda’s tabs work identical to virtually all other tabbed interface apps in that you can hot-key between them with the standard CMD+SHIFT+[ or CMD+SHIFT+] keys.

Finally, and most important, is user-interface. This seems like a moot issue, but there are still many apps that don’t utilize it. Coda does utilize it, and utilizes it well.

The most important user-interface aspect of tabbed-windows is the ability to re-order the tabs. A simple click and drag does the trick just perfectly. Moreover, Coda has more than just hot-key commands for new tabs. There is a “plus” symbol just under the toolbar, to the right of the file browser that you can click on to create new tabs. And to the far right is the “split window” symbol. A click on that and your current window gets split vertically or horizontally.

So at the end of the day, Coda’s claim to be a one-window app is valid. Coda is a great one-window application.

But there’s more to it than that…

The second challenge for a do-it-all application is to avoid overwhelming the user with too many options; i.e. “bloating” your app.

Coda is most certainly not bloated. If anything it could be argued the opposite – that Coda’s features are too skimpy.

However, put yourself in the developer’s shoes for moment. You’re going to take a Text Editor, CSS Editor, FTP client and a Terminal app. Then bundle them together, add a WebKit based prievewer and debugger, and offer some good documentation of PHP, CSS, Javascript and HTML. And finally: sell it for less than the cost of just a good text editor.

Panic didn’t set out to make the best text editor, CSS editor, etc… They set out to make one single application that contains all you need to build a website. And Panic has done a great job at keeping each of Coda’s components concise, powerful and focused – giving you the features you need while not requiring you to learn 4 or 5 new applications simultaneously to be able to use Coda efficiently. Sometimes good development decisions are about what you don’t put in.

An Aside Regarding Dreamweaver

When talking about one-window website development applications it’s hard not to mention Adobe Dreamweaver. And though Coda may easily be compared to the features Dreamweaver offers, Coda is much less bloated, much more snappy and infinitely more Macintosh-like.

In his Coda review for MacUser, Nik Rawlinson says,

“[Coda] could teach Adobe a thing or two, as it puts Dreamweaver’s multi-paged dialog to shame, and beats its sidebar-based CSS designer hands down. […] If you’re…ready to step up from Dreamweaver’s built-in code-based environment, Coda is an excellent choice.”

Coda was developed for people who work at the raw code level to build their websites. In contrast to Dreamweaver there are no pre-fabbed templates or WYSIWYG editors in Coda. Anyone who uses Dreamweaver would do well to look at Coda. Especially those in the market to buy, since Coda’s price tag is 5 times less than Dreamweaver CS3’s.

Starting With 1.0

On Monday, April 23rd, 2007 – exactly 10 years and a day after Panic was born – Coda 1.0 was launched, and it received quite a bit of buzz all about the internets.

• Cabel Sasser –
  

  This was by far the most complicated program we’ve ever built. I realized this when it dawned on me that I had never stopped doing design work for it. With most of our prior applications, I may spend a month or two creating a all-purpose Photoshop layout, cut up any important art, and then hand it over to the guys, possibly coming back to make a tweak every now and then. With Coda, the number of features and the scope of the project meant that even as soon as yesterday I was cranking out some interface pieces as .pdf’s

• John Gruber –
  

  One way to judge the scope of an app is to think about how much time you’re intended to spend using it. There’s plenty of room for apps you use here and there for a few minutes at a time, or which you launch just once or twice a week. There’s hardly any room at all, though, for apps you work in for hours at a time, every day.

  By this measure, Coda, the new app from Panic, is an epic.

• MacUpdate’s Review Forum is full of ravings –
  

  Wow. Do the folks at Panic ever make a mistake. Everything in Coda is amazing, it’s so intuitive it’s scary. Auto completion works great, the sites page is amazing, inline ftp, preview, all of it amazing. One thing I did notice, doesn’t seem to like flash, but hardly a dealbreaker. Bought and paid for this morning about an hour after release.

Moreover, April 23rd was also the submission deadline for the 2007 Apple Design Awards. And, waddayaknow but a few months later at the WWDC07, Coda won the award for Best Mac OS X User Experience –

Coda is a unique web development environment that offers a complete file browser (both locally and remotely), publishing, full-featured text editor, WebKit-based preview, CSS editor with visual tools, full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more. Coda is the Mac’s first one-window Web development application that integrates numerous modules into one cohesive user experience. Coda is a great Mac OS X citizen…

User experience has always been one of Panic’s fortés, and Coda is no exception. It truly is a beautiful, powerful, intelligently designed, all-in-one website building tool.

However, it’s important to note that there is something interesting I have seen in many of the reviews I’ve read about Coda. There seems to be this relatively universal love/hate relationship with the people who use it.

Even in my own experience with Coda it just doesn’t quite cross over from, “Wow! This is smart, incredible and beautiful!” to, “How will I ever live without this?”.

Joe Kissell says –

…it’s like buying your dream car, only to find out that the seats are kind of uncomfortable and there’s no heater. Coda comes so close to being great that its shortcomings are especially annoying. Having tried this way of working, I’m loath to return to having four applications open all the time – and yet I keep running into issues that irritate me almost enough to give it up.

Yet, let’s not forget Coda is still only a 1.x product, it is extremely affordable for the features it offers and Panic has a fantastic reputation for producing outstanding software for the Mac.

Coda’s components are all masterfully crafted and seamlessly integrated. It has all you need to code, debug, validate, stare at, drool over and then publish your website.

Steven Frank says that when the beta-testers were asked what their favorite feature was they all replied: “The integration. The way it all fits together. How everything’s somehow right where you need it when you need it.”

“Sites”

When you launch Coda this is where you start. Coda uses “Sites” the same way Transmit uses “Favorites”, and when opening Coda for the first time you are given the option to import some or all of your Transmit favorites if you like. You can also import them later.

Each “Site” is basically a collection of info and details about a website you’re working on or maintaining. Your “Sites” are represented by taped-up pieces of paper with a picture of your home-page drawn on the front:

Coda gets the icon images by taking a screenshot of your site’s homepage / root URL, which you can designate in the site’s info pane.

Having the visual icons to represent your sites is a nice touch, but a problem may arise if you have more than one saved site for the same root URL. Such as shawnblanc.net and shawnblanc.net/images. Both of those icons would display the same image on the taped up piece of paper. However, I don’t have my /images/ folder saved as a site, so it’s not a problem for me. And I think it’s clear that Coda wasn’t intended to replace your dedicated FTP client, so I doubt it will be a problem for many others.

But if you do encounter that problem the good news is you can choose custom images for each “Site”. To put your own image onto the taped-up paper, simply control-click on the site and “Change Image” to browse your finder for the image of your choice.

When you double-click on a “Site” the page flips around and expands into the full width of Coda’s window, revealing your previous workspace layout. Files, tabs, splits, everything is just the way you last left it and it is all ready to go. (Unless you left it in a mess. Try not to do that.)

The restored work session is one of my favorite features in Coda. It seems that most of the time I am opening up the same files for a site over and over. I can’t describe how wonderful it is to simply open up a “site” and have my previous session restored right the way I left it.

John Gruber expounds –

In terms of historical user interface traditions and conventions, Unix and the Mac could hardly be more different, but there is one similar philosophy shared by both cultures — a preference for using a collection of smaller, dedicated tools that work well together rather than using monolithic do-it-all apps.

Coda seemingly swims in the face of this tradition, in that it ostensibly replaces a slew of dedicated apps. Coda’s premise, though, isn’t so much that it is one app that obviates several others, but rather that web development can and should be treated, conceptually, as a single task. That you don’t think, I need to download, edit, save, upload, and preview a change to the web site; you think, I need to make a change to the web site.

There is something else that has stuck out to me in my use of Coda, which I don’t quite know where to talk about, so I’ll bring it up here: When using Transmit I always disconnect before quitting. I press CMD+D to disconnect and then CMD+Q to quit out. But the same key combo doesn’t disconnect you from your site in Coda. (Pressing CMD+D or CMD+SHIFT+D moves you to the next or previous symbols within a text document.)

If you want to disconnect from your “Site” before quitting not only are there no hot-keys to do so, you have to click the circle-encompassed “x” next to the name of your site up in the top left corner of the application.

And as many of you “don’t use the mouse if you don’t have to” / “I love Quicksilver” nerds will agree: clicking the disconnect button is too much. Therefore, since I can’t disconnect with a hot-key I find myself just quitting out, and it feels a bit like I’m unplugging my computer without powering it down first.

The Text Editor

For most users the text editor will be one of the two most-used features in Coda. (The other obviously being the Transmit turbo-engine-powered file manager / FTP client.)

Coda’s text editor is not a blow-your-brains-out-the-back-of-your-head kind of text editor. It wasn’t meant to be.

Coda’s text editor is its own licensed version of SubEthaEdit, which is one of few text editors which prides itself in being “a high-performance, sleek editor”; i.e. minimalism. To say the least, Coda’s text editor is powerful, clean and smart. It even comes with its own font, “Panic Sans”.

When it comes to text editors there are those who live and breath inside theirs, and everything else is just details. These people know every feature, every bug, every nook and every cranny of their editor and they use it for virtually everything. And these people just may pull their hair out when they try using Coda and discover it doesn’t have the ability to search within all the files on a site –

What Coda majors on is taking the most important features and implementing them in an intuitive, no-nonsense way.

For instance the bracket highlight feature: When your cursor passes through the beginning or end bracket a little blue beacon pops out at the other bracket, letting you know where the current symbol begins or ends. Simple, smart features like this are peppered all throughout Coda.

And not only are Coda’s little features smart, their interface is beautiful.

Compare Coda’s auto-complete pop-up list above to Dreamweaver’s below:

Not only is Dreamweaver’s box clunky and sports a drop shadow straight from 1997, but it brings up the entire code listing with empty brackets next to each tag. There is way too much going on. Notice how Coda only shows the tags that begin with ‘f’?

CSS Editor

CSS editors are becoming more and more popular. And for good reason. If I could remember everything I would much prefer to write my CSS from scratch by hand. But editing and writing CSS that way requires a bit more jujitsu than I have.

Coda’s CSS editor, much like its text editor, is simple and straight forward. You don’t have to examine it for an hour before you can figure out what you’re doing with it and how to work it.

If you already have a style sheet you’re working with you can open it in the CSS editor. It will display all the style elements on the left column with the built-in editor on the right-hand side. Click on an element to edit its type, margins, padding, color, border, etc… All the CSS properties are available for you to use and master.

You can build a style-sheet from the ground up as well; creating each element as you go. Or if you prefer, use the text editor to hand write all the elements you will be using then use the CSS editor to set the styles of those elements.

With Coda there’s no reason you shouldn’t have a fully-functionable and beautiful style sheet.

In addition to tabbed windows, Coda also allows you to split a window vertically or horizontally, and I’ve found that splitting the window vertically is extremely useful when working on a style sheet. I can then see and edit my CSS file’s text by using the text editor on the right, and then on the left split I put the dedicated CSS editor with a list of all my symbols and the visual style-selector; giving me the best of both worlds in one window.

“Preview”

Coda has its own internal browser so you can view the changes you make to your website right within the app.

It is a WebKit based browser, so your site will look virtually identical in Coda as it does in Safari. But nobody does browser testing in only Safari. To preview the same page in other browsers you simply click the icon to the right of the Coda’s Address Bar and highlight the browser you want to launch.

DOM Hierarchy Inspector

While in a Preview window you can activate Coda’s Document Object Model Hierarchy Inspector by clicking the magnifying glass icon at the bottom of the screen when in Preview mode. You may then scroll over the various modules in your webpage to see them highlighted in blue with their logical structure outlined below.

Not only is the DOM hierarchy inspector fun to play with as you watch blue boxes pop up here and there while you fling your mouse all over the place, but it is also a great way to get a visual grasp on how your code actually plays itself out, and is especially helpful for debugging and finding goofy errors with Javascript and HTML.

FTP Client and File Manager

Coda has Panic’s new “Transmit Turbo Engine”. (Get it?) For basic file transfers Coda actually claims to be quicker. It’s not a dedicated FTP client, but is certainly does the job it needs to do. The file-browser/Transmit combo works so seamlessly you may forget you’re working on a remote server.

When you click on a file either remote or local, that file opens up in a new tab. You can then tinker away to your heart’s content. If you are working on a file from your server, when you save will automatically upload the updated file.

When working on local files you can keep them local or choose to upload them to the current folder you have open on your server. Control-clicking gives you the option to upload, or to “Mark For Uploading”. When a file has been marked for uploading, Coda puts an up-arrow to the right of the file. Clicking that arrow uploads the file to the current folder you have open on your server.

When working on several files that will incorporate interlinked changes across your whole site, it is usually preferable to upload them all at once. Marking them for uploading helps keep them organized for you. Then you can close out the file, but keep it marked and when you’re done, upload all of them together.

The integration of the file manager and the FTP client is so seamless it is easy to take it for granted. The file manager is out of the way, but ready and available when you need to use it. And that, my friends, is the mark of a well-designed feature.

The Terminal

This is where I confess I am not that hard-core of a nerd. I am not a Terminal junkie, and in-fact, have not once used Coda’s built in terminal. Though if I needed to, Coda has made it as easy as possible by taking my “Site” information and using it to log me in via SSH.

Reference Books

Coda includes two books: A PHP reference guide and the “Web Programmer’s Desk Reference: HTML, CSS and JavaScript“, by Lázaro Issi Cohen and Joseph Issi Cohen –

The Web Programmer’s Desk Reference is the only book to serve as a single point of reference for all three primary web programming languages. Each listing includes the latest syntax and functionality, compatibility with other elements, and cross-browser compatibility issues.

The content in these books is comprehensive, easy to understand and very well laid out.

The biggest complaint is that the books are only available when you’re connected to the internet. Their content is hosted by Panic. This certainly defeats much of the purpose of having built-in reference guide. If I can only access it when I am online I could just as easily use Google to find what I need help with.

I would love to see these books saved locally to make them accessible when the internet is not.

The Little Things

It’s the little things in Coda that you may or may not notice that make it worth owning and using. The way a “Site” fades away if you delete it, or the way each of the primary six components in Coda have a numbered hot-key.

In fact, the little things in Coda matter so much it’s why Brent Simmons recently purchased a copy –

I used [Coda] to update NetNewsWire’s Help book for the latest release, and I liked the flow of it. I liked the easy flip between edit and preview modes. I liked having the list of files on the left. I liked the tabs. I liked the keyboard command for closing a tag. Etc.

But, most importantly, I liked the overall feeling of the program, and the sense that it would take care of me — that is, I felt like it probably had features I didn’t know I needed, and anything missing would probably be added in the future (things like multi-file find/replace). Part of this is just judging the app, and part comes from considering Panic’s track record.

Here are a few of the little things that stand out to me:

Symbols Quick Navigator

Clicking the brackets at the bottom toolbar underneath the file-manager brings up the Symbols Quick Navigator. It is a funky little table of contents for all the style-sheet symbols in your current open window.

The 3-Pixel Conundrum

If you’re a fan of the new look for selected icons in Leopard’s toolbars you have Cabel and Panic to thank for it. Cabel was un-satisfied with the default selection state in Apple’s toolbar. To make a long story short, Panic’s development team coded their own toolbar to make up for the trouble Apple’s toolbar gave them when trying to get the look they wanted. But someone at Apple noticed and the design became Leopard’s default. (Read the whole story, here.)

Clips

Michael from WordPress Candy points out how helpful Coda’s “Clips” feature is for doing WordPress theme development.

You can save any text you want as a “Clip”. This is extremely helpful for keeping common tags available at all times. And Clips has a Global database as well as a site-specific database. If you are working on a WordPress based site you can save your WordPress tags for that site, and if you are also working on a Textpattern site your tags for that are saved when that site is open.

Double clicking a specific clip paste that text starting at the cursor’s current location. Or you can click and drag a clip to any location in your file.

To open up the Clips use the hot-key CTRL+CMD+C, or navigate to “Window” then select “Clips”.

Miscellaneous

• If you move the location of your local root directory, Coda keeps track of where it goes. Even if it goes to the Trash.
• A dot to the right of the file name inside the file manager, or in the file’s tab tells you the file has had changes since the last save.
  
• The way the toolbar stays fluid with the file manager’s width. It’s hard to explain, but adjust the width of the file-manager window and watch what happens up by the toolbar. The icons stay fixed above the window, the site name stays centered above the file-manager.

More Reviews

This is just one of a handful of winded and entertaining software reviews.

The upcoming contender to Transmit is Flow. I’ve seen the videos and it looks impressive. Mostly though, it seems to be just another interface for the same functions Transmit offers.

One small thing that stands out to me from the demos is the copy to URL function. Say you upload a jpg to your images folder. You can then copy the URL from inside the ftp client, and paste it wherever you like. You can even set Flow to auto-copy to your clipboard for you.

The one thing about Flow that gets me though is the icon. Cameron pointed out Sebastian’s own post about how he designed it.

If the Dock was a voliére (a birdhouse, in good English), the Flow icon would be a paradise bird.

I’m not sure if I’m a fan of the icon or not, but reading Sebastian’s post was fascinating to say the least. It’s obvious Sebastian did a great job concepting and developing the icon.

P.S. Anyone know how I can get in on the beta testing for Flow?

Ever since the Pony Express, people have loved special deliveries.

You know what I’m talking about. The brown UPS truck drives down the street and you think to yourself, “Is that the book I ordered off Amazon, the RAM from NewEgg, or the authentic Star Trek Tricorder I won on eBay?” Regardless of what random item is coming today, you’re excited…

Transmit works that same spot in your brain that loves to send and receive. But instead of brown trucks and cardboard boxes with tracking numbers, you’re working with the files and servers and FTP on the internets.

Transmit is the FTP client for Mac users.

And anyone that uses a Mac knows I mean more than, “Transmit is an FTP client for the Mac platform”. Mac users have a high standard for their software. It has to do more than just work; Mac applications have to possess style, class and be enjoyable to use, and work like a charm.

Introduction

To truly appreciate Transmit, it helps to have at least a basic introduction to the dynamic duo that is the Mac software company, Panic, Inc..

Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser co-founded Panic about 11 years ago. Their original essays regarding the launch can be read in full here, with my hand-selected excerpts below:

Steven said:

Another thing that seems to have disappeared is the cool software company. Is there a Beagle Bros. of the 90’s? Most seem really straight-laced and are obsessed with “biz”. There are a few with a sense of humor, of course, but they are seldom seen and often overlooked in favor of the “serious” companies. With the software industry being so huge now, compared to the days of the II+, is it possible for a software company to be as personal as Beagle Bros.? Is it still possible to build a software company that will capture the imagination of the next generation of computer users? I don’t know. But I’d really like to find out.

And Cabel said:

I realize that I have to own and believe in my computer. My computer should give me something to fight for. My computer has to have a culture. […] we’ll always be Macintosh first, and Macintosh at heart. The users are consistently more supportive, intelligent, less likely to use ALL CAPS in beta reports, and excited about products.

The Mac, truly, rules. Any developer that says otherwise has forgotten what it means to love computers.

Panic, Inc. is a trend-setting, software development Dojo. Transmit was the first application I bought and is no less than fantastic.

Transmit Started Sans-M

Cabel and Steven released the first version of Transmit in 1998. It was for OS 9 and was actually called Transit. No “m”.

From the original user’s guide Panic tells us that “Transit was designed from the start to be clean, beautiful, and powerful all at once, just like the MacOS is.”

Later, in version 1.2, Panic added the “m”. (If you read the definitions of transit versus transmit, transit seems to make a bit more sense for an FTP client. I’m guessing they changed the name because they didn’t want their application ending in zit. UPDATE: Scratch the zit theory.)

In 2002, Transmit 2 for OS X came out, and now, over 10 years since its original launch, Transmit is at version 3.6.3. It’s universal binary, Leopard friendly and hailed as the best FTP client for Mac. (“It’s name is not Fetch.”) Among its recognitions Transmit has won an Eddy Award, MacWorld Best of Show, and an Apple Design Award.

Transferring Files

Let’s start at the basics for a second. Such as acronym definition. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Which is basically the way you take files from your computer and put them onto your website, and the other way around. You can put PHP, HTML, MP3, MOV and more. Anything you want, anywhere you want.

For the light-weight users Transmit is a great pick because of its reliability, quick transfers and its dashboard widget. I know many people who use free FTP clients, such as CyberDuck, and have had their fair share of headaches. Like poor Cameron, I too used CyberDuck for a while, but it crashed on a semi-regular basis, and just felt buggy and unreliable.

There is always a free “works just like the for-pay version” of virtually every application out there. But there is a reason the for-pay apps are for-pay. Transmit cost thirty bones. You just install it and go. Making peace of mind and reliability worth their weight in gold.

For the power user, Transmit has all the features you could ever use, making it like the huge dude in the gym that makes everyone else look like 7th graders.

What sets Transmit apart, is that it works great for everyone: the single-blog publisher, to the large-scale website developer. Transmit’s interface and usability is clean, easy to understand and works without fail, time after time. And that’s just the beginning. Transmit is packed to the brim with features you never knew you needed.

Like Panic.com says, “If you manage a web site, need to send a file to a friend running an FTP server, need to post eBay images to a image host, or download a lot of software updates, then Transmit is the perfect program for you: it makes FTP easy and fun”

The basic interface of Transmit is perfectly blunt. You’ve got “Your Stuff” on the left and “Their Stuff” on the right.

Your Stuff is what’s on your computer, and Their Stuff is what’s on the server. I like the idea, but I do think it could be named better. Just because a file is on another server doesn’t mean it’s “theirs”. I would prefer to see these named as “Here” and “There”, or “Local” and “Over Yonder”.

A drag and drop from either location, to either location begins the transfer. But you are not restricted to dragging and dropping from within the application. With an open connection, Transmit still acts just like a Finder window. You can take a file on your desktop, drag it and drop it over the “Their Stuff” window to begin an upload and vice-a-versa… It’s file transfering made obvious.

And more than just obvious – Transmit is powerful. It works with practically any server that uses FTP, SFTP, FTP TLS/SSL, WebDAV, or secure WebDAV. And, it works with your iDisk or Amazon S3 file hosting.

Connections

The one thing I surely use the most is Favorites. I have 14 server locations saved. I use about 3 or 4 of them every day, another 3 or 4 every month or so, and the rest on occasion.

(One thing that would make favorites better would be the ability to add notes. For instance, I have a handful of printers’ login information saved but it would be great if I could have a few notes attached to that info that reminded me who to contact after an upload, and other relevant information. I have that info on my computer somewhere else, but it would be nice to have it all in one spot.)

Working in-line with your Favorites is the Drag-n-Droplets the Widget, and (of course) Quicksilver integration.

To create a Droplet, navigate to an ftp destination, then CTRL+CLICK and select “Save Droplet for Folder…”

A dialog box shows up to save the droplet. You can assign the name, save point of the droplet and choose to save the login password as part of the droplet or to prompt for it.

Once you’ve created your new Drag-n-Droplet, just do like you would think: drag and drop a file. Transmit automatically launches, uploads the file, disconnects and quits.

The Widget is the same idea, but on your Dashboard.

And with Quicksilver’s Transmit plugin you’ve got QS integration as well. Simply get the file you want to upload in Quicksilver, tab over, invoke Transmit, then use the arrow keys to choose the Favorite you want to upload to.

From inside Transmit, another great feature is tabbed connections. You can simultaneously upload/download to and from multiple servers and folders. Even cross-transfer files from server to server. This is great for working on other files while a big upload is raging in the background of a different server.

Data Worry-Warts – Worry Not

Ever since its conception, Transmit has been more than just an application for moving files from one place to another. Additionally, it is an invaluable tool for those who use online file storage and syncing.

From the Version 1.0, user’s guide:

If you maintain a web site, prepare a software mirror, or otherwise frequently maintain remote files, you’ve probably need to synchronize — match or mirror remote files to local files on your hard-drive.

But chances are, you either did it painfully by hand, (the “eenie-meenie-minie-moe” system), shouted across the room to co-workers to figure out which files to upload (the “heyPhilwhatsthelatestheaderpic” system), or tried to hand-synchronize files and lost some really important files during the process (we can’t print the name of this one). By using Transit’s built-in synchronization system, you can easily keep remote and local files up-to-date with little effort.

This is great for backing up important data, or syncing entire file folders.

The Little (and not-so-little) Things

• File Editing: Turn to the person sitting next to you, and say “brilliant”.Transmit allows you to edit remote files locally – text files, images, whatever.

  Control+Click on a file and choose what program you want to edit it with. Transmit then downloads the file into a cache and opens it in your chosen application. When you save it, Transmit automatically uploads the saved version.

  Gone are the days of downloading a file, finding it, opening it, editing it, saving it and uploading it… Good luck breaking that old habit.

• Transfer Status Notification: When a file or batch of files are being uploaded or downloaded a little status notifier shows up over the dock icon.A blue up-arrow for uploading, a blue down-arrow for downloading and a green checkmark for completed.

  

  These circle icons also show up in the CMD+TAB application list, and coincide with Growl notification. All of which are extremely helpful for knowing the status of a transfer. I am often uploading large files, and will work on something else while waiting to send an “upload complete” email.

• .Mac Favorites Syncing: Yet one more thing that can stay in sync between your multiple computers. Super helpful for when I’ve added an ftp site onto my PowerBook while at the office then come home and need the same info on my Mac Pro.As an aside: Although it wasn’t a Transmit-only problem, I had some trouble with my favorites once I upgraded to Leopard. I had to fix all the login passwords for my entire Leopard keychain. It fixed 99% of my problems but some favorites I ended up having to delete and re-create.
• Speed: A few file transfers onto my (mt) Media Temple (gs) Grid Server via my home office’s 8MB/sec cable internet averaged 59.6KB/sec.
  • A 745,968 byte file uploaded in 13.5 seconds
  • A 1,826,571 byte file uploaded in 30.2 seconds
  • A 7,087,614 byte file uploaded in 117.5 seconds
  • A 4,791,477 byte folder with 3 files in it uploaded in 79.3 seconds
• Extras: For more Panic culture you’ve got to visit their Extras page.

More Reviews

This is just one of a handful of winded and entertaining software reviews.

Everyone has that moment when the spark of inspiration hits and they decide to publish a website.

Any sort of website. Perhaps an online cat-food shop, a photo journalism e-school, or a weblog about Star Wars Pizza Hut cup-toppers figurine collections. The options are endless, but the motivation is the same: To give something to the world. (Or to make a lot of money.)

And why not share your passions with people from all across the globe? Back before the internet people had to hand-write by candlelight using feathers and ink on parchment paper. And then if they were even fortunate enough to get their book or article printed perhaps local general store might be able to sell a few copies.

But now you can sit in Starbucks with your cappucino and your iPod while hammering away on your laptop. With one tap of the “Publish” button all the world can read your ideas and comment on your cup-topper collection.

At first you start your website for noble purposes. But after a while when you notice a few new people commenting on your posts you start to wonder, “just how many people read this thing anyway?” And that’s when it starts…

Even though you keep reminding yourself that it’s not about the traffic every time you get a boost in visitors, or a post gets extra comments, or someone new subscribes to your feed your heart skips a beat.

On the other hand, there are many perfectly logical reasons for keeping an eye on your website’s traffic and readership. Such as: Discovering the primary search terms that are driving traffic, or seeing who’s referring traffic in your direction, and more…

You can use whatever reasoning you like, but if you have a website you will use some sort of analytics program. So may I suggest you use one that rocks?

Good Taste

I have often wondered why, but there are some people who will order a steak at Denny’s or Village Inn. They want it cooked well-done, (if it comes any other way) and they coat it in A1 Steak-Sauce (to add flavor). But they don’t even bat an eye. To them, a steak is a steak. It’s the name “steak” that tells them they’re living large. And they seem oblivious to the taste of the overcooked, gritty meat.

And then there are people like my good friend Josh from Texas. He will spend an entire day on Saturday preparing meat for a grill-out on Sunday. He tenderizes and marinates the cuts. Then he cooks it all to perfection, and we all savor every bite because it’s goooood.

And Shaun Inman‘s Mint is a website analytics program for those kinds of people: The people who highly appreciate spectacular (and tasty) things.

In a recent Be A Design Cast Interview Shaun Inman gave a brief explanation of how Mint came to be –

What Mint came from is that I had my own personal site and I never found a stats package that fit my needs. They had the rainbow graphs. All this information I didn’t need, and they took a day to render stats. I started playing around with PHP and MySQL, I took all these things that other people were suggesting and created this thing called Mint and wrapped it up in this nice design package. And really the idea was just to have this stats package that was just barebones, no-nonsense, “give me what I want to look at”. The number of hits I’m getting, where they’re coming from, what they’re looking at…

So I built this little application, and I launched it two years ago and it was this cool suprise success.

Version 1

The graphical interface from Mint 1 is very much like the debut of Aqua from OS X 10.0 – in that both were huge breakthroughs in interface design in their respective markets. Both looked completely different and much more appealing than anything else people were using at the time.

I thought it would be fun to reminisce and look at a few screenshots of what Mint Version 1 looked like. So scroll down slowly and enjoy…

And before it was even released the beta testers were singing it’s praises. So while we’re remminiscing, here are some excerpts from a few of the beta testers’ initial reviews.

Rob Weychert, “Mint: A Stats Odyssey” –

I have owned a few web sites in my day, and like anyone who makes their work available to the public, I like to know the whos, how manys, from wheres, and so on, of the people checking out my stuff. Luckily for me and my fellow narcissistic publishers, there are plenty of stats packages out there that can inform us how many hits our sites have gotten, where our visitors are coming from, what browsers they use, and much more. Unluckily, most of those stats packages suffer from shortcomings that undermine their usefulness. Every one I tried either focused on one narrow statistic or presented me with more information than I knew what to do with.

Jason Santa Maria, “Pepper Makes Mint Better” –

…word on the street is Mint even has an Easter Egg. Needless to say, I haven’t touched Refer in all the months of beta testing. Shaun did it, I’m a convert.

Mike Davidson, “Mint: The Flavor of The Month” –

It’s not Urchin, it’s not Analog, and it’s not designed to record every single hit to your website since the beginning of time.

But that is its strength.

Form and Function

The initial structure and feel of Mint hasn’t changed much, but it has certaily been spruced up since 2005. In version one the first thing you noticed was Mint’s clean, beautiful look.

And the same goes with version two, but it’s even better. Have a look-see. (With the Dark Pepper Mint style installed.)

And just for fun, let’s compare the daily hits/visitors pane from Mint with the same pane from Webalizer…

Now onto Function….

Mint lives and breathes within the panes. This is where all the information you want to see about your site can be found. Not only are the panes an intelligent implementation of your data, they are full of fine detail.

Talk about form and function: Mint’s panes are a seamless blend of the two.

Each pane serves up a specific class of data. Such as “Visits”, “Referrers”, “Pages”, “Searches” and more. But within each pane is not just a generic list of numbers. There are several tabs to serve these numbers up in different, useful dishes.

For example, take the Referrers pane. Just mash down on any one of the four tabs to see information about referrers to your site in a different, but still very useful way.

Moreover, an additional bonus to the Newest Unique tab is the RSS feed it offers. Here you can subscribe to the newest unique referrers to your site and track them from the comfort of your favorite reader. This provides a fantastic way to keep tabs on new, incoming links to your site. Which ultimately leads to the Mint High-Five, but I’ll get to that later.

Another helpful pane is “Searches”. Here you can see your most common queries that land people to your site. This is more than just “oh, neat” information. By knowing what people are searching for, you are secretly informed on which Star Wars cup-topper is the most popular. It can be extremely helpful if you want your site to be more relevant and visitor friendly.

For me, the light turned on when I saw that there was one particular search that was dominating for keywords: “iPhone Tips”. Over the past few months that search query has sent ten times more Googlers to my site than any other search, and they all are landing on the same page: my iPhone Tips and Tutorials List.

When I saw that thanks to Google my iPhone tips page was the second most popular landing page on my site I decided to put a little bit (emphasis on little) of effort into warming the page up to newcomers.

All these stats aren’t exclusive to Mint, of course. There are certainly other other analytics programs which inform you of searches and visitors too. But when you’re looking at ugly charts your eyes can get blurred and your brain can turn off and you can easily miss out on important information.

In the end though, it’s always the little things that stand out to me. My favorite graphical element in Mint is the transparent cross-hatches at the top of the screen. They sit just under the navigation bar.

They’re discreet, sly and add the finishing touch to an overall superb design.

Now pause, and think about this: How was Shaun able to get numbers and URLs to look so incredible and feel so noble? Thanks to Mint, even our puny site stats still seem stunning and exciting.

Setting Up Mint

To use Mint you need your own hosted domain and your hosting server needs support for MySQL and PHP to setup the database. This is basically the same thing a good CMS needs, and if you’re paying more than $2 a month for hosting you should be fine. (If you’re looking for a good hoster, Mint and I both recommend (mt).)

Installing Mint is a cinch. You fill in your database info, upload the folder and then follow the instructions. If you’re not too savvy with phpMyAdmin, there is a great step-by-step guide for setting up a database and user on the WordPress Codex site.

If you need some assistance configuring Mint with your CMS here are some helpful threads from the Mint forums:

• Configuring Mint for WordPress
• Configuring Mint for Expression Engine
• Configuring Mint for Movable Type
• Configuring Mint for Textpattern

Pepper

Even if all we got were the basic functions bundled with Mint – or a “Thin Mint” install – it would still be worth the cost. But Shaun has opened the app for 3rd party developers to create additional “plugins” called Pepper – as in Peppermint.

By adding Pepper to your Mint installation you are able to expand its capabilities. And thanks to the many 3rd party developers that have produced some fantastic additions, there is a wide variety of fantastic peppers available to widen the scope of your Mintabilities.

I have a pretty small Pepper lineup on my Mint installation. Other than the bundled “Default” and “Backup/Restore” peppers I only have the “User Agent 007”, “Trends”, “Outbound” and “iPhone” peppers installed.

Here’s what they do:

• The Default Pepper covers the basics. It is responsible for tracking the number of page views and unique visitors, where they are coming from and what they are looking at, as well as which search terms led them to my site. These statistics are displayed within four data-specific panes.Note: It is always a bummer to see the latest 15 referrers to your site as Google Images domains. Ramanan posted a list of all the google images sites to enter in to the Referrers Prefs panell so they don’t show up in your newest unique list. For archive’s sake, I posted the list as a text file, here. Just select all, copy and paste.
  
• Backup/Restore does not record or display any data in Mint. It is simply a utility to backup and restore my Mint database tables. Though I have yet to need it.
• User Agent 007 goes undercover to uncover who’s using which browser on which platform at what resolution and with which plug-ins installed.
• Trends simply tracks trends across a specified period. Such as which permalinks are up or down in page views compared to last weeks.
• The Outbound Pepper tracks clicks to links on external sites.
• The iPhone Pepper enables single-column mode in Mint when browsing from an iPhone—leaving the default multi-column experience for the desktop. Mint on the iPhone is gorgeous.

You can find a list of all the Peppers at at Mint’s Peppermill or at the Peppermint Tea site.

Junior Mint, The Dashboard Widget

When checking your stats is only an F12 (or F4) away, the the Junior Mint Dashboard Widget can get addicting.

If you’re not using Mint version 2, or your not on OS X 10.4+ there is still a solution for you. You can use the Stale Mint widget for Mint 1, a Yahoo Widget, or a Windows Vista sidebar gadget.

The dashboard widget combined with your Newest Unique Referrers Feed make a great pair. Going hand in hand for discovering and then determining the source of a new traffic spike. When you notice on your Widget that more visitors are coming in than normal you can open your feed reader and check the Referrers List to see who’s sending the traffic.

The Com-mint-ity

More than the design and the functionality of Mint, there is also a community of users. Rob Goodlatte nails it saying,

It’s one thing to have a lot of customers, but it’s an amazing accomplishment to have so many customers who are rabid fans of the product — like everyone I know who uses Mint.

Mint is being worked on, developed and used by people just like you and me. It truly is what Shaun wanted it to be: A simple, fantastic, beautiful, “show me what I want to see” application. It is fun to use, it’s constantly updated, and there is a community of happy Mint users.

Which brings us to the high-five…

One way the Mint community connects is through what I like to think of as the Mint Referrer High-Five. There is something about seeing someone-elses-site.com/mint/ in your referrers list that tells you they were intrigued, and wanted to see why your site was showing up in their referrers list. They wanted to know what you were saying and why you were sending them traffic, so they came over to check things out.

Their …/mint/ referral showing up in you referrer’s list is like a high-five from them to you.

As long as were on the topic of community, other Minters include Sean Sperte, Panic Software, John Gruber, Ben Gray, Dave Caolo, Kevin Cornell, Glenn Wolsey, Cameron Hunt, Michael Lopp and of course – Shaun Inman.

More Reviews

This is just one of a handful of winded and entertaining software reviews.

NetNewsWire is arguably the most popular desktop feed reader on the planet.

That does not, however, mean that NetNewsWire is the most popular RSS reader, period. Far from it, actually. Web-based feed readers seem to be dominating the market share. (Worth noting is Greg Reinacker’s article unraveling part of the mystery behind the growing domination of online feed readers.)

I wasn’t able to find any cut and dry feed reader market share stats that were any more recent than the ones FeedBurner published two years ago. But based on various articles, conversations and website statistics it is pretty clear that online readers are the most popular feed reader. Specifically Google Reader. Just look at your own site’s stats, and I’m sure they’ll concur. (For the most part.)

According to the stats for ShawnBlanc.net, 75% of readers are subscribed to my feed through an online reader. Of that total online readership Google takes up 49%, NewsGator 26%, Apple RSS (various) takes 8%, Firefox Live Bookmarks takes 5%, Bloglines 4%, and various other online readers add up to the final 8%. (With 1% too much because I rounded up.)

The remaing 25% of my subscribers are using desktop feed readers. With NetNewsWire accounting for over 50% of my desktop reader’s market share, or 13% of the total market share for ShawnBlanc.net

In addition to being the most popular desktop feed reader for ShawnBlanc.net, NetNewsWire’s built in browser is the fourth most used browser for viewing this site. Right after Safari, Firefox and IE.

Web-Based Feed Readers

My intention here is not to sway 75% of my readers away from your online feed readers. I am aware that there are many reasons you may use an online reader. Such as:

• Nothing to Download and Install: If you’re reading feeds on not-your-computer on a regular basis this is a convenient feature indeed.
• Universal Uniformity and Syncronization: Your reader looks the same and acts the same and is always just how you left it no matter what computer you access it from.This can be very helpful (or very un-pet-peevish) if you work in a cubicle on a windows machine and then come home to a Mac.

  The advantages of having your feeds synced between multiple computers can be huge. And if you’re reading feeds on multiple platforms an online feed reader is pretty much the only option.

  UPDATE: Tom from Evolvepoint mentions that NetNewsWire syncs with the complete NewsGator RSS suite which includes the PC application, FeedDemon. I don’t use a PC so I hadn’t even considered FeedDemon.

• Free: Online feed readers are free feed readers. That’s always nice.The draw of using a free feed reader is a big one. Especially if that free reader is powerful enough to handle all your feed needs and leave you with a smile at the end of the day. But in my experience I’ve noticed two major drawbacks to using free readers: First off is the interface. No offense, but Google reader is not very exciting to look at. And secondly, many of the free desktop readers I’ve tried out are sorely lacking in usability, options and developer support.

If you’re using a web-based feed reader because it’s free, you need to take a look at the upcoming release of NetNewsWire Lite 3.1 (the free version of NNW), because those who refuse to pay for their feed reader are in for a real treat. But more on that in a minute.

Getting The Perfect Gift

Giving someone the perfect gift is not easy. Tons of clueless husbands have botched it up anniversary after anniversary. Countless grandparents have resorted to just giving away cash at Christmas. And why do you suppose the gift card is so darn popular?

My uncle, on the other hand, is a superb gift giver. Every year at Christmas he finds the thing you never knew existed, and most certainly never would have asked for. And when you unwrap it, you realize it’s exactly what you wanted.

Discovering the perfect program is quite a bit like receiving the perfect gift.

But it’s not easy to find a piece of software that is exactly what we want, when we ourselves often don’t know exactly what it is we want.

Sometimes we find it on accident. Sometimes we find it on a hunt for an unknown solution to a problem. Usually we find it by a random combination of both…

Sunday Morning

For me, it started a few years ago on a Sunday morning while I was at church.

My church has wireless internet, which is ideal for downloading the Sunday morning notes. It is also ideal for checking email and reading blogs when I’m supposed to be listening.

Let me back-track a bit…

This would be quiet a different story if I had not been introduced to personal blogs only a few months prior.

Additionally, if it had not been for the illustrious blogroll which inhabited every sidebar, I never would have been introduced to the lives of other people whom I’d never met and who barely knew how to put a sentence together. Within a few short months of reading sites and following sidebar links I had compiled (within a bookmarks folder) well over 15 different blogs!

To keep up with these sites I would open my bookmarks folder about three or four times a week and visit each blog one at a time as I casually checked up on the latest story.

Visiting each site one at a time is more personal and relaxing for sure. But it didn’t take long for my list of 15 sites to grow into the low-twenties. As I began checking in daily, the task of keeping up became more and more tedious. Eventually my reading time turned into Russian Roulette – Blog Style. Keeping up with the new articles was quickly becoming less and less fun. I needed a way to know what sites had new content so I could spend my time reading instead of looking. I needed an RSS reader. And I didn’t even know it.

This brings us back to the Sunday morning in which I casually glanced over at my friend’s PowerBook. He had his feeds pulled up in Safari’s feed reader.

“What in the world?!” I thought.

He was reading news headlines and articles from all sorts of different websites, and they were all put together neatly into one window. Incredible. I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing but I instantly recognized its potential to solve my problem. By the end of the sermon I had subscribe to all my favorite blog’s feeds using Safari and the church’s wireless.

But let’s be honest. Anyone using Safari’s RSS reader as a serious point of entry for information will quickly discover that it doesn’t cut it. And just as Brian had predicted, the Safari RSS reader contributed to the sale of a dedicated feed reader. Because within a week I was already looking for something better.

It wasn’t until after I fumbled around with a few not-so-great readers that I came accross Brent Simmon‘s smash hit RSS reader, NetNewsWire.

I first jumped on board with NetNewsWire Lite 2.1, and I used it for several months until Brent and Ranchero released the 3.0 full version. I downloaded the free trial and was blown away once again. Seriously. The interface, the layout, the simplicity. Everything. I was hooked, and my wallet was 29 dollars lighter.

NetNewsWire has changed my expectation for Mac application development. I’m not a programmer, but Brent and his Eddy Award winning program have been an onramp for me to learn more about the indie Mac Development community, and that is why I’m so fond of this application. NNW has become a marker to me for when my eyes were opened to the many heroes of the Mac community who create amazing software and make our OS X lives that much better.

NetNewsWire

What makes NetNewsWire so great is that it at once appeals to every level of user.

For the basic user who checks a few feeds once a day, NNW provides a familiar and friendly environment. For an average user who has several dozen feeds to keep up on, NNW is quick and effective. And even the power user, who lives and breaths inside their feed reader, will discover that NNW has the horsepower to feed their need for feeds.

From the NNW homepage, Cory Doctorow says, “This is the app that lets me drink straight from the Internet firehose, and I couldn’t live without it.”

At its initial launch, NNW was already in a class of its own. Brent patterned the traditional 3 panel layout after common email layouts, like Mailsmith, Outlook and Apple Mail. The general look and feel of NetNewsWire has been consistent ever since version 1, but it has certainly received a good spit and polish over the years.

Have a look…

Version 1.03

Version 2.0

Version 3.0

Version 3.1beta

As of this writing wersion 3.1 is in the final beta stages of development. And even though it’s not a major x.0 release, Brent sure is treating it like one. (I suppose largely because of the upcoming release of NetNewsWire 3.1 Lite (the next big upgrade for the free Lite version which is currently still at 2.1.1.), and the software updates for compatibility with Leopard.)

When version 3.1 (Full and Lite) does come out of beta I imagine nearly every user will upgrade. Either to the for-pay version (3.1 Full) or the freeware version (3.1 Lite).

For those already using the 3.0 Full version the most obvious changes they’ll see in 3.1 are visual: The new toolbar icons and the Leopard style folders in the subscription list and site drawer.

Those who upgrade from 2.1.1 Lite to 3.1 Lite will discover much more than just spectacular visual changes.

I’m taking a complete shot in the dark, but my guess is that the number of NNW Lite users is more than double the amount of NNW Full users. Meaning that the vast majority of those who upgrade to 3.1 (Lite or Full) in the near future will be upgrading from 2.1.1 Lite or switching from another reader. Meaning a lot of people are all in for a real treat.

Top to bottom, NetNewsWire 3.1 Lite is primed to be the best, free news-reader available for Mac.

A Few of My Favorite Things

The majority of the strong, underlying features available in the current full version will also be available in the new Lite version. Just because it’s a free news-reader doesn’t mean it’s a wuss. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Here are a few of my favorite features that will be a part of the new NetNewsWire 3.1 Lite.

• • Syncing: I have a Mac Pro in my home office, a PowerBook that I use out of the office and on the road, and an iPhone that I use, well, all the stinkin’ time. NewsGator’s online feed reader syncs all the feeds and their groups, across Macs and on the iPhone NewsGator web app. All three locations are always in sync. Everyone together now: “Ahhhhhh…”Syncing via NewsGator is not your only option. You can also sync with .Mac or your own FTP server.

• Spacebar: Similar to the “J” in Google Reader is the spacebar in NNW. You use the spacebar to take you to the next unread article and then to page down through the content of that article. If you start at the top of your feeds and hit nothing but the space bar you will work your way all the way down. Voila!I didn’t even know this feature existed until Brent listed it as his favorite in our interview. Although it’s not my favorite, the feedback I’ve heard from other’s tells me it’s popular.
• The Way the Arrow Keys Work in The Traditional Layout: NetNewsWire’s traditional layout is similar to the layout of most email applications. The sites list is in the left hand window, the headlines are shown in the top right window, and the article content is displayed in the bottom right window. This is the layout I use because I read my articles by site, not as a compiled list of headlines.When using the traditional view, one thing I love is the way the arrow keys work. Using the arrow keys you can navigate anywhere you want. From the subscription list to the headlines, down the headlines to an article. Back to the list and so on and so forth. I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to do the same thing in Apple Mail only to get the error dong noise.
• The Animated Arrow-Out to Permalinks: Sometimes it’s the little things.As odd as it sounds this was the main reason I bought NNW 3.0. I don’t read websites in the feed reader. I use NNW only for checking up on new content. When an article shows up that I want to read I “arrow out” to the website and read it there.

  I like the animated arrow-out for two reasons:

  1. It gives a visual response to the action of leaving the headline and going to the article. Since I have web-pages open up in the background in Safari it’s great to have that visual feedback.
  2. It’s very un-selfish. The whole structure of NNW is designed to serve the user and give them exactly what they want without making them feel as if they’re using it for something it wasn’t specifically intended for.

  This is most likely exactly the type of feeling Brent was looking to develop with his software.

  In Brent’s interview with John Gruber in 2005, John asked if Brent had ever considered limiting the number of subscriptions in the Lite version of NNW. Brent’s reply:

  For maybe one second. I hate limits like that. It’s one thing to not have an entire feature like the Weblog Editor, but quite another thing to arbitrarily limit the number of subscriptions. Doing that would, in my mind, make the Lite version no more than an advertisement for the Pro version.

  The animated arrow is a positive, visual feedback given when leaving the application. And even though it’s just a small element when compared to the whole program, it is a dynamic statement of the way NNW is built: to serve the user.

• The New Toolbar Icons: In previous versions, the toolbar icons were designed by Bryan Bell and John Hicks.But Bobby Anderson designed the new icons for version 3.1 and I think he did a fantastic job. They’re much cleaner and less clunky.

  And simply by looking at the new “Refresh All” button and comparing it to version 2’s, you can see that Mr. Anderson did his homework.

  

• Rands’ First Law of Information Management Which reads: “For each new piece of information you track, there is an equally old and useless piece of information you must throw away.” (via)By continually adding new feeds to your subscription list, you’ll eventually reach such a point of information overload that you end up losing the very purpose for which you first began reading websites. (That is of course, unless you want to simply scan the headlines of hundreds and hundreds of articles, in which case you must be very happy about the space bar feature.)

  Eventually you have to get rid of some feeds. I clean my subscriptions out every few months. NetNewsWire has made it more than easy. Click on “Window” > “Feed Reports” > “Dinosaurs” / “Most Attention” / “Least Attention” / “Bandwith Usage”.

  The Dinosaurs report tells you who hasn’t updated in 30 days, the Attention report lets you know what sites you give the most attention to and what sites you give the least attention to. Bandwidth report tells you which feeds are the bulkiest.

• The Sites Drawer: Click on “View” > “Show Sites Drawer” and you have access to hundreds of sites. Chances are pretty good that several of the sites you’re already reading are in the drawer.

The Pay-For Full Version

NetNewsWire Lite is a fantastic app, and I have no doubt that many people will see no need to pay for the full version. Before I met Brent, I knew very little about the Apple indie developers community and even less about the time and energy they put into their software. But now I’m sure that supporting great software and the people who make it is a worthy cause.

If you want more than just a worthy cause, here are a few of the extra features you’ll find in the Full version of NetNewsWire.

• • Flagging: You can flag items and they stay in the reader forever. I use this all the time to highlight articles that I want to come back to for reference.
  • Tabbed Browswer: You can open web pages directly in NetNewsWire. And these tabs save themselves even if you close NNW. This is great for opening an article’s homepage within NNW, but coming back to read it later.
  • Interface Options: The widescreen, three-column view and the combined view. I prefer to use the traditional.
  • Search: You can search the feeds within NetNewsWire, you can search on Google, Google Images, and more. Including the new HTML Archive.

• HTML Archiving: This is one of the new features in the Full version that I suspect most people will not notice, or simply skip over when they upgrade.In previous versions you could only keep articles long-term if you flagged them, and you could only search feeds that were currently cached in NNW. But that is no longer the case.

  From the NNW Beta page Release Notes –

  NetNewsWire can now store news items on disk as separate HTML files. The idea is to give people a way to archive and save stuff without having to keep it in NetNewsWire.

  The fewer news items in NetNewsWire’s storage, the better it performs. This feature is designed to give you a way to keep an archive without having it hurt NetNewsWire’s performance.

  The obvious benefit of the HTML archive is that it’s searchable because a local copy of every article is kept indefinitely on your hard drive. This is fantastic if you want to find something that was read several months ago, and you don’t have internet access.

  A potential issue is that the archive takes up its fair share of disc space. With just the feeds that were in my reader the archive folder weighs in at 12MB. And I don’t even have that many subscriptions.

UPDATE: NetNewsWire is now free. You can download it here.

More Reviews

This is just one of a handful of winded and entertaining software reviews.