Lukas Mathis points out some nits in Coda’s interface.
For what it’s worth, we’ve become very keenly aware of the cognitive dissonance that many people have with Coda’s modal UI.
When we designed Coda, we wanted to do a web IDE in a way that it hadn’t really been done before (or at least not to our satisfaction) — within a single window, and without panels, toolbars, and views exploding in your face from every direction. It’s harder than it seems. We got a lot of things right, and a few things wrong.
Although I didn’t at first, I personally now consider the way the toolbar interacts with the main content area to be a misstep. It works OK once you figure it out, but there’s a learning curve that just shouldn’t be there. Which is a shame, because it’s the very first thing you have to deal with when running the app for the first time. (If you’re still struggling, our video tutorials get most people over the hump.)
If you’ve ever designed software, you’re probably familiar with how an idea that seems to make sense on paper doesn’t pan out once it’s up on the screen and interactive. I think that’s what happened here. However, the mere existence of our existing approach gives us a vocabulary that we didn’t have before, which will make future refinements easier to approach than our 1.0.
The good news is we’ve been talking (and talking and talking some more) about relatively minor changes we can make to improve this particular bit of user interaction, and we have some really solid ideas that you’ll start to see around the 2.0 timeframe that I think will sort this out without bringing too much disruption to the Coda users who’ve become accustomed to the way it works now.
