
Coda 2 review professional#
None of this means we’re permanently, irrevocably turning away from professional iOS tools. That’s a long way of saying: we gave it our best shot.īut, you know us - we love to make things, and we never say never. We just weren’t confident that the additional work required could sustain itself.
Coda 2 review plus#
In the end, we concluded that this hypothetical app didn’t fully address the needs of modern web developers, plus we’d be facing stiff competition from other high-quality apps that are laser focused on this space.
Coda 2 review code#
So, we’d be facing a huge investment of time with the possibility that it would all ultimately get rejected.įaced with this situation, we considered a more modest design: what if we combined Apple’s new File Provider technology with a streamlined text editor? Then we could at least create a version of Code Editor with robust local file support. Similarly, WebKit is the only allowed web rendering engine on iOS.Īnd still, even if we could find some clever technical way around all of these limitations, we wouldn’t know if our approaches would be allowed on the App Store until we’d fully built and submitted them for review. Although JavaScriptCore is excellent, many developer tools rely on features or behaviors only present in Google’s V8 JavaScript interpreter. Apps on iOS and iPadOS must use Apple’s Javascript interpreter, JavaScriptCore. The scope would quickly become unmanageable, and we’d always be lagging behind the latest versions of these tools.Įven if it were viable, we’d likely run afoul of App Store policy as well. We’d need to bundle compilers, interpreters, and language servers for just about every programming language in existence, not to mention tools like linters, JavaScript transpilers, and bundlers. While we could attempt to build the TypeScript compiler into Nova, we can’t possibly anticipate and include every such tool that might be needed by a developer. For example, the TypeScript extension is one of the most popular Nova extensions right now, and it launches and runs the TypeScript compiler. There’s just no way around it: this is required for modern web development. The biggest technical hurdle is the inability to run external processes on iOS and iPadOS. This is why having a flexible extension system is essential for a modern web-focused IDE. The churn of new web tools and tech is rapid and constant. During its development, we got requests to support libraries and technologies we thought long dead, as well as requests for brand new frameworks we’d never heard of. Launching Nova reaffirmed to us how technologically diverse web development has become. What about making a version of Nova for iOS?Īs of right now, we don’t have any plans to bring Nova to iOS because, well, it’s hard to imagine how it would work. So, as the time went on, fewer and fewer web developers found Code Editor useful, and sales declined. The only way to make this work in Code Editor was to separately run the compilers on a remote computer in a different app a cumbersome proposition for a mobile device like an iPhone or iPad. (Not to be confused with the other document editor named Coda, not developed by us.) Those same changes to web development workflows also affected Code Editor.Ī significant number of web developers now use tools like TypeScript and JSX, which often require a build or compilation process before they can be previewed. This ultimately led to our release of Nova for Mac, which supports more modern workflows and replaced Coda 2. The process of web development changed dramatically in the years after our release of Coda in 2007, and our products needed to change with it. Why?įirst, we must apologize to those of you disappointed by this news. Unfortunately, like Transmit iOS and Status Board before it, we’re discontinuing Code Editor as it doesn’t generate enough revenue to cover its continued development.īut that’s not the only reason.

The goal was to make a great code editor for iOS that anyone could use on-the-go.

Introduced in 2012, it was packed with innovation, like our “Super Loupe” designed to make iOS cursor placement more precise - even fun, and an “iPad Preview” that let you use your iPad as a dedicated website preview screen long before Sidecar.


If you’re pressed for time, here’s the short version:
