Amazing Coder » Random

And the winner is!…

Lewis King — Fri, 01 May 2009 17:01:24 +0000

After many, many entries, re-tweets and fun, we've put all your names into a hat, shuffled them around, and I can now reveal that the person to win a free copy of Tweetie for Mac is! ...

Jay Aaron (@newthoughts)

So congratulations to him and thank you to everyone that entered, we've got some more great prizes coming up in the near future, for now, leave a comment, congratulate or give us feedback on what we did well, and what we did bad. This is your chance to get heard! Thanks once again everyone and we hope to hear from you soon!

Tweetie for Mac giveaway.

Lewis King — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 17:46:43 +0000

We here at Amazing Coder are big fans of twitter, we use it every, single day. When Tweetie for iPhone was released by atebits, it changed twitter clients forever. Now, looking to expand the user base, Tweetie for Mac has recently been launched. Apart from looking stunning, Tweetie for Mac has some really great features, for instance, full conversation support, multiple accounts, threaded DM's, endless preferences and much, much more. So to celebrate the launch of Tweetie for Mac, we are giving away one copy to one lucky reader of our site. There are a few things involved, so to not waste homepage space, click read more below to get started. Although Tweetie for Mac is free to download and try for as long as you want, there is a paid version. This removes all advertising from the program and is currently at a price of $19.95 ($14.95 until May 4th). We are giving away a fully registered copy of Tweetie for Mac, to you. Here's what you need to do:

1. Follow us on Twitter.
2. Tweet out this short message
3. Subscribe to our RSS.
4. Comment with your twitter username. (@lewisking - for example)

See, no biggie! Once this is done, we will pick a winner on Friday the 1st of May. Anyone can enter, no matter what age, or location. So what are you waiting for?! Get going Any questions, please ask in the comments below, or @reply us on twitter. We answer all. Until next time, keep visiting the site for news, reviews, interviews and giveaways, Much love!

Gallery is on it’s way!

Lewis King — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:16:52 +0000

Hey guys, Just a quick post to tell you that we've been working on a gallery of the best websites we've found, but, we need your help. What do you want to see? Websites that feature great tutorials, or websites with great design? Seeing as we're a coding blog, we were thinking of the former, but it's entirely up to you, our readers! Just post a comment with the one you'd like to see, or both, then post any other ideas you have or features you'd like to see about the new section. We read every comment and will get back to you personally. Post away!

Guest Post: Espresso.

Lewis King — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:05:05 +0000

Not content with having the best CSS editor around (CSSEdit), Jan Van Boghout of MacRabbit fame set out to destroy Coda and own top spot for the best XHTML, XML, CSS, JS or XSL editor and FTP Client around. Currently in public beta, Espresso is lacking some of the promised features of the GM release (such as “Sugars”, Espresso’s extension interface).

However Espresso is in a position where it can do some damage to it’s biggest competition, Coda. The interface on Espresso is much cleaner and makes entire project management much easier. The left sidebar is split into three sections: Workspace, Project, and Publish. Add a folder where your project is located, or start a new one and Espresso will keep it wrapped in a single file until you are ready to publish. The Workspace is a good idea done well, allowing you to easily switch between files you are working on.

CSSEdit’s fantastic editing functionality is also here. Coda’s editor is feeble in comparison and offers another win for Espresso. While I couldn’t find the split, or GUI views of CSSEdit in Espresso, I still found coding supremely faster than in Coda. The toggle-able right hand sidebar displayed all of the elements in webpages or stylesheets and I found it to be particularly helpful when working in large files.

The HTML editor is also akin to that of Coda’s, not better but not any worse. Collapsable elements meant that the coding process was much cleaner, and allowed for the largest of documents to be manageable. Espresso also handily syncs files with a server and relays any changes either performed on the machine or the server side.

While Espresso is definitely a step in the right direction, I couldn’t help but miss some of my favourite features from Coda, or CSSEdit. Like I said previously CSSEdit’s wonderful and helpful split views are nowhere to be found, and I couldn’t work out how to make groups. Live Preview is there, but hidden in an obscure location under the “New” button.

All in all, Espresso is a great project management tool, but right now I don’t think it is quite ready for day to day use. I shall stick to CSSEdit and TextWrangler for now.

Written by Steven Radford. I'm a 16 year old designer and coder from rainy Bristol, UK. Coding since 2005, and located at http://www.graphicsplant.com. I code XHTML and CSS, and am currently learning JQuery.

What's your favourite program for coding? Do you use one? Post your comments and start the discussion below.