Earlier this week, Panic – maker of apps Transmit, Prompt, and Coda – unveiled a humongous, free update to Diet Coda, now called Coda for iOS. Panic really wants to stress that that this is no longer an accessory or counterpart to the Mac app, but rather a full fledged text editor for the iPad, and now, iPhone. I’ve been using it these last few days and love what I see.
Coda has long been a great text editor and FTP client for the Mac, but Diet Coda for iPad was always a stripped-down version of it. But Coda 2 for iOS has some amazing new features that make the fact that it’s a free upgrade questionable!
The new UI looks great on both iPhones and iPads. The main screen presents a grid view of all the websites configured. Rather than just icons, though, the grid will show a preview of the home screen of your app. You can also organize sites into folders. The syntax highlighting also looks great; the colour themes provided are quite tasteful, but you can change between a few different fonts and font sizes if you’d like.
Panic Sync will keeps all your sites synced across devices, no matter which device you’re on – Mac, iPhone, or iPad. It also works with their standalone FTP client Transmit
FTP is built right into Coda, which really makes it standout from other web developer tools. Upload and download files, rename them, duplicate, delete. You name it and Coda can do it. Not only do your standard FTP, SFTP, FTP with TSL/SSL, and FTP with Implicit SSL, but you can now connect to protocols like Amazon S3, DreamHost’s DreamObjects, and WebDav.
Besides these, Coda 2 lets you code in new modes, such as Go and Swift, features Javascript playgrounds and side-by-side file viewers, and features all the power of their SSL client Prompt 2 from right inside the app. Yet there are still hundreds more improvements made in this ginormous update. Coda 2 for iOS is available for the incredibly low price of $9.99 and is a free update to Diet Coda users.