Sam Soffes

I’ve been using Panic‘s Coda app for awhile now. It’s so awesome. I defiantly recommend picking up a copy of Coda if you do any web coding at all. It’s the best by far. For a while, I used Adobe‘s Dreamweaver. All I really want from one of those apps is nice code coloring, good SFTP/FTP, and a way to manage multiple sites well. Dreamweaver wasn’t designed for those things. It was designed for people who don’t know how to code and want to drag and drop stuff. The features in Dreamweaver that I liked seemed like second thoughts rather than intentional features.

Coda does a really good job of integrating all of the things that I want and not adding much else. I’m a big fan how simple the app is. I rarely use the books feature or CSS tool, but they are cool anyway. In the newest version, they really improved how the terminal tab works. I like it a lot.

Speaking of version 1.1, they added a ton of Leopard features. It’s really nice. The sites animation finally looks good on my MacBook Pro now. I like the glow on the buttons at the bottom. That wasn’t there before. It looks nice. You should give Coda a try. They have a free trial.

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Being a professional web developer (that is someone who makes there living by developing web), I think myself, as well as other professional web developers, should have some what of a say in what they will be developing for. All we really care about is the engine. I’ll explain.

I saw this story about the browser war on Digg and started thinking about how dumb all of this is. People are arguing about which browser should be the new mobile platform in the comments. Firefox, Flock, or Opera were the options. First of all, Firefox is running Gecko. That is the engine it uses to render (X)HTML, CSS, etc. so you can see it (in other words it takes code and makes it pictures on your screen). Flock is running Gecko too, although a newer build which was funny to me. They are the same thing with just different wrappers on them. (Even Netscape in all of its crappiness is running Gecko now.) Opera, Safari (which runs WebKit), and Internet Explorer all have there own engine.

The fact that people are comparing Flock, Firefox, and Opera amazes me. I really don’t like Opera. It’s slow, ugly, and not very user friendly. I rarely check my stuff in it because so few people use it. They do have a few innovative features, but overall I don’t like it. Flock is cool. I like that they’re trying something new, but I still like Firefox over Flock. As far as my personal preference goes for a browser, I like Safari. It looks nice, it’s quick, and easy to use. What can I say, I like Apple? When I’m developing, I always use Firefox because of FireBug, an awesome web development plugin for Firefox. The ugly form fields bug the crap out of me though. If they’d fix that and make it faster, I’d switch from Safari.

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I’m getting tired of my green and gray with leaves. I think I go trough more of website designs than I do desktop backgrounds. (Speaking of desktop backgrounds, InterfaceLIFT has some great ones.) I am currently working on a new one that is very CSSy and very text focused.

I really liked how my new design looked in Photoshop with Myriad Pro Light. It just didn’t look as good with Lucida Grande. I just happened to mention to my friend Sam McDonald. He reminded me of sIFR. I forgot all about sIFR and how awesome it is.

sIFR uses some Javascript and Flash to replace certain elements on the page with flash versions with the non-web font. It’s kind of hard to explain. Check out Mike Industries for and example or his post about sIFR.

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Christmas is coming a little early for me this year. I just purchased an Insignia 26-inch LCD HDTV. It was only $379 at Best Buy. It’s a pretty good TV. It was really cheap so I didn’t expect it to be fantastic, but so far, it’s pretty nice. I only bought it because it was cheap. Since I have this nice new HDTV, what am I going to do with it? I guess I’ll have to buy an Xbox 360. So I did.

It’s pretty nice too. I really like the 360. I was going to buy a Wii, but I changed my mind. I figured that, at the end of the day, I’d rather sit on my couch and play Halo 3 or something instead of run around and play tennis or something physical. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of video games. I thought the whole point was to be lazy. The Wii is awesome if you have a group of people. If it’s just me in my apartment, I’d rather play the 360.

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So today, after moving my musings (or blog if that’s what you want to call it) from my own engine that I wrote in CodeIgniter, to WordPress (which is also fantastic), to nothing, and back to WordPress, I have finally landed in ExpressionEngine. Since I am using ExpressionEngine is multiple places now for work related things, I figured it would probably be good to use it on my own to get more familiar with it.

ExpressionEngine is awesome. It is really flexible, powerful, and still easy to use. I am using it currently at Southeast for the Student Ministry web sites. It works really well for us there. I know that LifeChurch.tv is redoing their website in ExpressionEngine as well. They all love it too.

The cool thing about ExpressionEngine is that it is built by the same people that built CodeIgniter. ExpressionEngine uses a lot of the same core classes that CodeIgniter uses. From what I’ve heard, writing modules, extensions, and plug-ins is really easy. I haven’t written any yet, but I will be soon for work related things. I’ll probably get a podcast maker of some sort going here in a bit.

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