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There are plenty of web development apps on the market, I am going to do a post soon comparing them all, but a new one that I was interested in is Espresso. It is from the makers of CSSEdit. It is currently only available to private testers, although I managed to get myself signed up on the list and I got a look in. Its a different kind of web development program and I am going to do a preview review of the application in its current state. It is in preview mode, which means quite a lot of the program isn’t complete with features missing, but the bulk of the program is there.

Get Me an Espresso

The idea behind Espresso is to develop websites in a way that is different to the normal flow. Programs such as Coda are, in a way, different programs tide together. Espresso is designed to be an all in one program that you use to develop websites. It takes a different angle on things.

Espresso doesn’t have a way of following through from one step to another, every aspect of your site is there. You have your project in the sidebar, which is your hierarchy of files. This is your file browser, at the top of your sidebar is the files you are currently working on. At the very bottom if your publish option. This is a method of seeing what files and folders you have to upload to your site. The image below is from Espresso, simply because it looks a lot more interesting than the one I took.

Espresso has all of your syntax highlighting and autocompletiton (although limited in this verison) and is designed to be a simple to use as possible. All of you editing tools are in the smae place, you edit files using the same window.

There is two (I think) main differences between this program and similar ones on the market. For example it is very developer based. There is a whole section dedicated (especially this preview version) about developing sugars. These sugars are plugins for Espresso. They are special pieces of code which is used to have the syntax highlighting. This means that people will be able to develop this program to suit there tastes. In a similar way to an API. The second different from what I can tell is that uploads are not don’t on a live server, but are done at a specific time. For example you develop a section on your website using your local machine and then upload it to your production server.

Conclusion

From playing around with this application today, I have found it quite interesting to use. It was difficult at first to get my head around this application but I was used to Coda. Having a half built application doesn’t help. But from what I saw it was very interesting and definitely has potential.

I could see this program develop over the next couple of months and be quite good. But for the purposes of this preview review I am going to give it two stars, simply because it isn’t complete. Although I am sure the final program will be bumped up to four at least. If you want to try this program out you have to apply and sign up on this page. There isn’t a release date, although I expect it to be round MacWorld.

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