Joseph Schmitt

No seriously, I was¹. Honest to God, I did real programming and fixed a couple of real bugs for an imminent new feature/product on Vimeo using Panic’s Diet Coda. I even did it all using just the touch-screen keyboard (because I appantly hate myself). It was all surprisingly smooth and straightforward² and completely blew me away. Within minutes I had done a fresh git pull, diagnosed the bug (in Mobile Safari, for reasons I’ll get to), implemented a fix, confirmed the fix, and pushed up to our repository. Major, MAJOR kudos here to the folks at Panic. slow clap. A beer on me when you’re in town.

After the initial shock wore off that I was doing all of this on a freaking iPad, I did start to notice a bunch if things about the app: some good, some bad. That’s what I’ll spend the rest of my time talking about, starting with³…

The Good

There’s a lot to love here, and in typical Panic fashion, the UI is equal parts splendidly well thought-out and gorgeous. I could talk all day about the innovative way they handle file tabs, or the super loupe, or the scrollable bread crumbs. But you’ve undoubtedly heard about all these headlining features already, so instead I want to talk about the tiny, detail stuff that made me smile/gave me a big-ass grin:

Multi-touch: what is it food for
Text selection, it seems. That’s right, you can start a text selection with one finger in one hand, and when you put another finger down on the screen (likely from your other hand unless you’re related to Plastic Man) you’ll select all the text in between. It feels so natural in use that it’s silly it took this long for someone to implement it. If you’re less dexterous, tapping and dragging on the line numbers in the left-hand gutter will do the trick too.

A save button
Yes, this might be the “Post-PC Revolution” where things auto-save and yadda, yadda, but when we’re editing remote server contents, you want more control over when a file should be updated (and uploaded) saving is key. Luckily Diet Coda delivers with a handy (amd gigantic) green check-mark. I’m equally grateful they forewent a floppy disk icon for the button itself.

Context-sensitive keyboard
I certainly wouldn’t recommend building a whole site using the touch-screen keyboard, but when in a pinch it works well enough. And the part that really made me smile is the bar of shortcut buttons above the keyboard changing based on the language of the file you’re working with. Angle brackets for HTML, dollar sign for PHP, semicolons and parenthesis for JavaScript. Nice.

Go to line number
Not much else to say here other than I’m glad it wasn’t overlooked. Also, it’s beautiful.

However, as good this initial release of Diet Coda is, I found myself getting quite frustrated at several points while coding. Almost none of it had to do with limitations of a tablet or touch-screen platform, leading us to…

The Missing

Unfortunately, this list is going to be a long one. I don’t do this to nitpick (yes I do). I do this because this app got so much right and came so close to making me feel comfortable in it, that these sore spots really hurt.

No route mapping
This one hit me right off the bat and was pretty much the only thing keeping me having a 100% working setup immediately. The file preview button might work great for static HTML files, but if your site has even a modest level of complexity, your preview url probably won’t fall into the /remote-path/path-to-file/file scheme. Some way to declare a different url when previewing a file’s changes (or just being able to spawn a browser window as a new tab) would help. Until then (and until the preview browser can show Console logs), I’ll be previewing changes in Mobile Safari.

No quick-find for files
Our project structure is massive. Thankfully, apps like TextMate (TM) and SublimeText 2 (ST2) have a “Find in Project” command that behaves like Quicksiver or Alfred for files in the project you’re in. I didn’t realize how much I depended on this and how much I forgot about where our files lived until I had to go looking for files on my own.

No quick-find for symbols
In conjuction with a quick-find for a file in a project, another stunningly useful feature in TM and ST2 is the “Go To Symbol” command. This behaves very similarly to “Find in Project”, except it’s just for the symbols in your open file (symbols being things like functions in JavaScript, tags with ID’s in HTML, or CSS declarations). Sure, the find window works, but it’s much slower since it’ll match both the invoked version of what you’re looking for as well as the definition itself. Textastic offers a list of symbols you can jump to, which would be a good start too.

Hitting “return” in the find window doesn’t jump to the next result
Instead, it just adds a return character to the find input field. I guess I understand why they need to support multi-line finds, but there needs to be an easier way to go to the next result. The next button is much to small, especially if you want to keep your eyes on the search result itself as you tab through on to the next result. I’m just as likely to hit “Replace” as “Next” when tapping blind (which can be quite destructive, actually).

Comment shortcut button doesn’t comment out the whole line
It’s hard enough to perfectly position your cursor in iOS, so it’s especially annoying that in order to comment out a line of code with the handy Comment Out Button, I have to position it perfectly at the beginning of a line. Just have it work the way most text editors do: if I hit the button, no matter where in the line my cursor is, comment out from the beginning of the line all the way to the left.

Wrap a selection when using paired punctuation (ie. quote, parenthesis, bracket)
This one’s a biggie for me and relates to the previous one. Again, cursor positioning is really hard on iOS; it takes a lot of effort to get the thing at exactly the right spot next to a word. What’s a lot easier, though, is double-tapping to highlight a word. Therefore, I was dissapointed to find that typing any of the pair-punctuation characters don’t wrap around a selection. What do I mean? If I highlight a word and hit single quote, I want that word to be surrounded by a single quote on either side of the selection, not replaced with it. This is a huge time saver on a desktop text editor, but would be amazingly convenient on iOS.

Tabbing from anywhere in a line doesn’t indent that line
Similar to the comment-out button, but for indentation. I don’t want to have to position my cursor when indenting a line. Let the indentation apply to the whole line no matter what position in that line I’m in.

No way to turn off line-wrapping
I hate soft-wrap, especially for code. It’s nice for certain types of code, but more often than not it just makes me confused as to the structure of a document. This is especially annoying when writing things where line-endings and indentation tell you the structure, like HTML and JSON.

Terminal session quits way too often
It seemed to me like if I spent more than a couple of minutes outside the SSH client, by the time I switched back I would be logged out again. Mildly annoying to say the least. Would be nice if I could at least change the timeout time.

No code snippets for terminal
Speaking of that SSH prompt, 90% of the time I switched to it was to type ‘git status’, ‘git pull origin master’, or ‘git push origin master’. It would be nice if I could save these snippets in a similar UI as the ones in the code editor.

No redo???
I saw the undo button, but for the life of me couldn’t find a “redo”. That has to be a mistake, right?

These are all things I feel are essential in a code editor for me to go more than 30 seconds without getting frustrated. There are, however, a few nice-to-haves that I’d like to see in Diet Coda…

The Pie in the Sky

This wouldn’t be a ridiculous, unsolicited product review without a few outlandish feature requests, right? Right. Let’s get right to it:

Multiple Carets and Selections
Alright, this one’s probably asking for a bit much, but once you have multiple carets and selections, there’s no going back.

Syntax-highlighting needs some work on mixed files
For example, a PHP file with inline CSS and JavaScript.

Better code completion
“A”-for-effort for even trying to implement this, but in practice I found that the auto-suggest window didn’t suggest very many useful things. Something to work on.

The fact that the pie-in-the-sky list of web developer that uses text editors every day for a living is so short really speaks volumes about this app, which leads me to some…

Conclusions

Diet Coda is great. Seriously. This app might not be your first choice to do serious work on (yet). However, if the only reason you’re taking your huge, heavy laptop with you on that otherwise relaxing vacation is just in case you get the 5-alarm-fire call from your boss because of a major bug that needs to get fixed RIGHT NOW (don’t they all?), Diet Coda and an iPad with an LTE/3G connection could be all you need.

Facebook’s Wall Street investment banks warned top clients of new doubts about the social network’s financial prospects just days before the company’s IPO, according to a series of reports that emerged Tuesday. After receiving briefings from Facebook executives, analysts at the banks lowered their financial forecasts for big institutional clients, some of whom scaled back plans to buy Facebook stock, even as the banks raised the IPO price and number of shares amid a frenzy of hype.

This is why I stay away from IPO’s, especially popular ones; people turn into absolute animals when trying to cash in on a hot property. I’d much rather wait until the fervor quiets down, for 2 reasons:

1. All of this nonsense of people trying to beat the system will hopefully be done by then.

2. I’ll have time to watch how the company does after the hype is done to make a better informed decision about how they’ll do over the long term.

If buying shares on the first day is absolutely essential to you because maybe you won’t get the absolute cheapest price that first week, should you really be investing in the first place? The amount you “missed out” on in the first week should be meaningless compared to how the stock of a healthy company does over 1-2 years.

This. is. genius:

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Our new live-in maid, Rosey, arrived today. I hope my girlfriend doesn’t get jealous that I’ll be home alone with her every day.

pile:

This is now a blog about my dog. No apologies.

I think Andrew and I might start a cute-dog-off…

Storage bliss.

Yo dawg, I heard you like hard drives… (Taken with instagram)

iheartchaos:

Keep scrolling. Your world will be changed forever, I promise. Teach it to your children and they’ll teach it to their children and in a few generations, we’ll have a worldwide Utopia. You’re welcome.

Oh… my… god…

Rands:

There’s a reason I didn’t mention this until paragraph 17 because there are a lot of folks who think gamification means pulling the worst aspects out of games and shoving them into an application. It’s not. Don’t think of gamification as anything other than clever strategies to motivate someone to learn so they can have fun being productive.

See, whether you’re developing a game or an application, you want to your users to experience…

“The Moment”

Your visitors don’t give a shit if your site is responsive. They don’t care if it’s a separate mobile site. They don’t care if it’s just a plain ol’ desktop site. They do give a shit if they can’t get done what they need to get done. They do give a shit when your site takes 20 seconds to load. They do care when interactions are awkward and broken.

This.

jackzerby:

Scientists pour 10 tons of cement down an abandoned ant colony structure underground. After the cement is dry they excavate the entire colony and study the structure…

wow

Holy shit.

• Rich: AH YEA MONDAY!
• Joe: :-|
• Joe: This might be the first entry on "I Have No Idea Why We're Friends"

What some of us want — those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money — is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible… but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that — sorry, kiddies-you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay — not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay — in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.

I don’t care who you are or what side of the aisle you’re on: paying taxes is your civic duty, it’s patriotic. And paying your fair share is the way you give back to a system that was structured for you to be able to succeed.

futurejournalismproject:

Rupert Murdoch, the document said, “did not take steps to become fully informed about phone hacking” and “turned a blind eye and exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications”.

The committee concluded that the culture of the company’s newspapers “permeated from the top” and “speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International”.

That prompted the MPs’ report to say: “We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of major international company.”

To which I reply: “no shit”.

And it’s not just Hulu making it tougher for cable-cutters to stream shows and other content.

Fox, owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post, is expected to begin talks soon with Comcast on a TV Everywhere deal that will require authentication. Plus, Philadelphia-based Comcast is expected to switch to an authentication model for this summer’s Olympic Games (see story at right).

The move toward authentication is fueled by cable companies and networks looking to protect and profit from their content.

Translation:

We’re scared of becoming irrelevant. instead of figuring out how to become relevant in the future, let’s just knee cap what people want and protect our current models. The now is just so warm and fuzzy compared to the cold and scary future!

Remember when Comcast set out to buy NBC how people complained to the FCC that they would just go out and hinder services like Hulu, and the FCC said “no worries you guys, we’ll make sure that never happens”?

Yea….

Whatever Apple’s disruption for the TV industry is, it can’t come soon enough.

(via The Joy of Tech comic… The same old story.)

Google indeed wants to have it both ways. It wants to keep Android closed like the iPhone in some contexts but at the same time demands legal privileges, including the privilege to infringe anyone’s intellectual property, because Android is supposedly “open”. Google’s claim that the Galaxy Nexus source code is just as much of a trade secret as the code running on the iPhone contrasts with what Google told the ITC two months ago in connection with Apple’s complaint against Motorola

I think we need a bigger set of quotation marks around “open”.

Florian Mueller, on Google’s disregard for other people’s intellectual property:

I think Schwartz was being overly diplomatic by referring to Google’s approach to free software as naiveté. Scott McNealy’s statement that they are “immune to copyright laws, good citizenship” was a more accurate description. In my opinion, a very consistent disregard for other people’s and companies’ intellectual property rights, whether it’s in connection with Linux, some non-Linux GPL software, Java or most of YouTube’s content, can’t be attributed to naiveté. There comes a point when someone who’s always naive when it benefits him is simply being reckless and possibly arrogant.

I think software patents are bad for the business. They should be abolished. I’m sure Google thinks the same; the system is fundamentally broken and should be changed. But until then, that doesn’t give you the right to steal from others and blatantly break the law.

For the most part, our dog sleeps and looks cute all day. This is a video of what happens when she loses her mind…