Let’s get this out of the way: I love Panic. They’re the gold standard of independent Mac software developers, and the existence of a “What Would Panic Do?” bracelet is no coincidence. They’re funny. They’re smart. They make gorgeous, fun to use and yet highly productive software.

It is very unfortunate, then, that their newest product, Coda, is not for me. It’s not the price tag, which, while perhaps a little steep, is quite justified for what Coda has to offer. It’s not that it doesn’t have attractive features I’d love to have: the Subetha Engine, Transmit Turbo (no permalink, I’m afraid; it’s in the Files tab of Coda’s site), the DOM Inspector (Preview tab) or its simplified interface to regular expressions quickly come to mind. It is one heck of an impressive application.

My problem, then, is with its slogan, which very concisely and accurately reflects its concept: one-window web development. I do not want my web development to occur in one window. Much as I dislike tabs, I dislike just about anything that limits my ability to manage a large number and variety of individual windows. That is, multiple browser windows, often spread across different browsers (or even different versions thereof), multiple text editor windows typically in one and the same app (normally TextMate), but sometimes more specialized stuff (and perhaps even a nano session here and there), multiple terminal windows – some local, most remote via SSH – , and a means of transfer, perhaps through rsync or a more traditional SFTP client. On top of that, my IM windows in Adium and (rarely) Skype, my Mail client, more browser windows for following forum posts, Wiki changes, new blog comments and RSS feeds, the Twitterrific window for new tweets, the iTunes window, and finally a Finder window here and there. That’s a lot of complexity, but also flexibility, and I don’t think I’m really capable of sacrificing what I’ve gotten so used to. I think it isn’t intended for me.

But even if I were to assume for a second that I could get accustomed to Coda’s workflow (I did, after all, start liking having iTunes handle all my music, or iPhoto/Aperture all my photos, all in one and the same main window and app), it still seems to me that it’s tooled too much towards doing everything client-side. Most of my development interacts heavily with the APIs and back-ends of WordPress, Invision Power Board and MediaWiki, or on tinkering around with Ruby, none of which Coda is probably prepared to work with; I’d be largely on my own.

Perhaps Transmit Turbo will make it to a 4.0 release of Transmit (would give me another good reason to finally buy it), and perhaps the Subetha Engine will come to TextMate. Before either of that happens, though, I do recommend you check out Coda yourself, because it may very well be an awesome solution to you. Even if it’s not, the spectacular website is worth a look at.

(P.S.: If you explain the meaning behind the icon to me, I’ll explain that of this post’s title.)

Update: A few additions.

First, a big reason I’ve omitted above on why Coda wouldn’t work so well for me is that I’ve already gotten so accustomed to several bundles of TextMate’s. I keep discovering new handy features in them, and they keep getting improved. This isn’t very fair for Coda; I’m essentially locked in out of mere habit. Coda isn’t designed to be that extensible, nor should it be; it is specifically and rightly targeted towards XHTML, CSS and JS. That said, I wouldn’t rule it out that Panic could win a few more customers by adding some TextMate-bundle-like shortcuts, assuming Coda doesn’t already have them. (I must admit I didn’t check. Sorry!)

And second, Cabel Sasser gives a brief, and Steven Frank a more extensive, overview. As I understand it, Cabel eventually intends to talk a little more about what development was like, whereas Steven would like to focus on cool stuff you can do with Coda instead. Sounds great!

Third, Steve makes one important point, too: Coda is not yet another RapidWeaver/iWeb/Sandvox-esque app, all of which are mostly template-based. Rather, this is more of a Adobe (née Macromedia) Dreamweaver-like beast, and will either prove an alternative to that, or, as I’ve alluded to above, to a many-apps-and-even-more-windows workflow (which many will indeed want to get rid of; it can certainly prove annoying).