Bryan Connor - Young and Freelancing

Goodbye Dreamweaver: The Next Generation of Web Dev Apps

As all of the Dreamweaver competitors are sure to say, sometimes as a freelancer you need to step back and examine your work-flow. How many programs do you need open for web development? How many clicks does it take to update something on your website? What do you wish you could do faster and more simply?

With Dreamweaver, as was the case with me, developing websites took at least 3 separate programs; Dreamweaver, an FTP program, and at least one web browser. At one point I would make a change in Dreamweaver, save the file, switch to my FTP application, click file > upload, navigate to the file, hit enter twice (once for overwriting the file on the server), and then switch to the web browser and refresh the page to see my changes. That’s too much.

I don’t know what prompted me to look elsewhere but I’m certainly glad I did. With all of the following apps, a description simply won’t do – you’ve got to try them for yourself. Take each for a spin for their respective trial periods and see which works for you.

Coda

Trial: 14 days
Price: $99 ($85 if you own Transmit)

From the very awesome software creators known as Panic comes Coda – “one window web development for OSX.” Coda has a built in text editor, file transfer (on save), CSS editing, auto complete, and even live preview ( similar to Safari ) – all within the program, no app switching required. It’s much more than a bare bones text editor with extra features such as “books” of code reference, in-program-terminal, and the ability to manage and switch between multiple sites quickly and easily.

Textmate

Trial: 30 days
Price: $50

A little more closely related to a barebones text-editor, Textmate does the job of being a light and easy to use web development application. It plays nice with FTP programs allowing for automatic upload on-save, limited auto-complete, foldable code blocks, helpful code highlighting, and some incredibly useful bundles to speed up coding. It seems overly simplified but once you get used to a few awesome key commands it can be quite transformative to your work-flow.

Espresso

Trial: 15 days
Price: $60 ($50 if you own CSSEdit)

Espresso seems to be the main competitor to Coda and as such offers many of the same features. Built in FTP, live preview, a very nice looking auto-complete, and a nice file browser are all in one window. Espresso also has some interesting features like collapsible sections of code that you can actually drag and drop around your document. All this combined with smart snippets, a spell checker, and ways to extend the program further make Espresso an inciting professional web development application.

How do you develop?

What are your work-flow secrets? What applications do you use to create and manage websites? What made you see the light and switch applications? Please answer in the comments below.