Panic just released another quality software for Mac: Coda, an all-in-one web development tool.

Coda is not an IDE “a la” Dreamweaver but rather a collection of apps. Serious web developers generally use separated apps to develop their web site: a text editor, an FTP client, an SSH terminal, several browsers and a bunch a reference documentations. Coda integrates them all.

With Coda, a web site defines a context of development. When you open it, all these apps gets “connected” to your web site and you can make changes remotely in a snap.

I’ve tested Coda to hack some of my web sites and it got everything I need. In that context it can replace efficiently my following apps:

• Emacs or Textwrangler
• Firefox + Firebug
• Terminal with SSH
• Cyberduck FTP
• SeeSS and fcXHTML Reference — two dashboard widgets for documentation

Coda is a really good initiative by not trying replace existing apps but by providing a better integration. Coda is really about that, taken separately each “Coda app” has less features than the equivalent app but the whole integration increase the productivity.

A negative point with Coda: it includes “yet another text editor”. Learning to be productive with a text editor takes a lot of time and moving to another is always frustrating — even if the Coda editor is good. I’ve only used Coda to make changes to an existing web site remotely and it was fine but for writing a site from scratch I would rather use my editor of choice.

That said, Coda is a very good software, gorgeous and well integrated with Mac OS X. It definitely worth a try. Congratulations to Panic.