Phew! Two weeks ago I was in the middle of one of the most intense working weeks of my life — finishing a website, tying together the order system, sending out beta builds, and dreaming constantly about Coda. Now it's out, and overall, it's gone really well. While there is still a lot of stuff we'd like to add to Coda, what's been most gratifying to us is hearing that people are just as excited about this idea that we've been for the last year. That's a nice thing. Sure, Coda isn't for everybody, but it's nice to know that it can hit that sweet spot for many. ("Coda is amazing! It's like a lightening bolt straight to the chest. And when I came to consciousness I realized how badly I needed Coda but didn't even know it", wrote one effusive user that we love. "i was wondering if i could get a discount on your software if i show you where i spotted a spelling mistake?", said yet another user who we love just as much.)

Anyway, the Coda train is still rolling, but I wanted to record for posterity a couple of interesting "launch numbers".

27 Mbit: Peak Web Throughput

Our colocation facility — and our lone Xserve G5 — held up as amazingly as ever. We did have continual problems with MySQL stalling under duress, which really sucked, but Apache handled the incoming flurry of web requests with aplomb.



Actually, 27 Mbit of peak traffic was not too bad, overall. Why wasn't it way higher? Well...

643 GB: Amazon S3 Traffic

...for the first time ever, we offloaded the bulk of our file transfer needs — the Coda download itself — to Amazon S3.

The result? Amazon pretty much saved our e-asses. We just threw the file up on Amazon S3 (possibly using a certain development build of a certain file transfer client), and rewrote the link to point to S3. That's all. There's nothing worse than seeing the Apache process list fill up with processes that nothing more than long downloads, as those requests could be doing many other things like, for example, allowing someone to buy the program. It was great to off-load the heavy lifting and never have to think about it again.

So, all told, users downloaded 643 GB worth of Coda in the last seven days. The total bill? $128. Mellow.

1,748: E-Mail Messages

When we release major updates, I like to take over the support box for a week or two. It gives me a very real, direct sense of how the app is being received, what the major issues are, and what people really want in the future. (Plus, I enjoy talking.)

The final score? Of the 1,748 e-mails we've received in the last week, I've replied to 1,638 so far.

I actually enjoy it — my wrists, not so much.

Top requests: Subversion. Find/Replace and Compare Differences across many files. Improved local previewing. Draggable tabs. More languages; mainly ASP, JSP, and ColdFusion. Tag balancing. Etc. Noted!

Now that the support velocity has slowed to normal, today I'll hand the box over to the ever-capable Tim.

One: Congratulatory Snack Pack

The talented and thoughtful Dan Messing of Stunt Software, a Friend of Panic, just sent over some Zany Canadian Candy / Sucrerie Canadienne Folle. I don't suspect it'll take long to eat it all.


Thanks so much, Mr. Messing!

Next Up: 1.0.1

We're just now putting the finishing touches on Coda 1.0.1. Of course, if you set Coda to automatically download and install updates, you won't have to do a thing — just use Coda, and we'll take care of the updating for you! Otherwise, keep an eye on the Panic website, and thanks so much for trying Coda and giving us your thoughts. Onward!

So, about a year and a half ago we began work on a new piece of software for Mac OS X. Four months ago we had a workable product that we sent to a select few friends for feedback. Two months ago we began full scale beta testing, cranking out eight versions, each better than the last thanks to the efforts of 150 testers. Three weeks ago we began building a website for this product. Six days ago we finalized our icon. And today, the day after Panic's 10th anniversary as a company, it's done.

Introducing: Coda, one-window web development for Mac OS X.

We build websites by hand, with code, and we've long since dreamed of streamlining the experience, bringing together all of the tools that we needed into a single, elegant window. While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.

So, that's what we've built. Coda has a complete file browser (and the ability to work locally or remotely), publishing, a full-featured text editor, a WebKit-based preview, a CSS editor with visual tools, a full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more.

Anyway, that's the pitch. You're probably either really excited by now, or you wish I was writing about video games again!

Steve has a lot more on his blog and will be talking a lot more about how Coda works, while I hope to talk a lot more about the "making of" Coda, specifically the design, over the coming weeks.

But before I get back to hopelessly keeping an eye on various server logs — lord help us all on this launch day — I must give a quick shout out.

This was by far the most complicated program we've ever built. I realized this when it dawned on me that I had never stopped doing design work for it. With most of our prior applications, I may spend a month or two creating a all-purpose Photoshop layout, cut up any important art, and then hand it over to the guys, possibly coming back to make a tweak every now and then. With Coda, the number of features and the scope of the project meant that even as soon as yesterday I was cranking out some interface pieces as .pdf's. (...pdf's? Yeah. More on that later.) Sure, I really enjoyed it!

But I just do the design. So it goes without saying that Coda never could have been created as quickly as it was without the incredible work of the Coda team. From Dave, who never once blinked at my crazy pieces of paper, to Ian, who created an entire visual CSS editor from scratch after our original plans fell through, to Wade, who meticulously created many features like Clips and Preview, to Will, who tirelessly re-tooled our Transmit engine to bring its speed up by orders of magnitude, and Tim, who turned mockup into standards-compliant website in record time despite me repeatedly telling him to just use tables for everything, and Noby, who localized everything into the wee early morning hours. Mike and Les kept the Panic machine running smoothly while simultaneously pitching in with ideas and testing build after build. Even just calling out a few contributions here seems like a disservice to this talented group of guys and the work they did. While working as a "large" (five person!) team brought some new challenges to Panic, I think the end result speaks for itself, and I'm very proud of it.

Coda is certainly a 1.0, and there are so (very) many features and ideas we hope to add in the future, but we're proud of this 1.0, and we can't wait to hear what you think. Our e-mail box is open. Have fun, and we hope you enjoy it!