Today’s Apple Design Awards deadline brought us the release of two awesome apps: Panic’s Coda — their first major new app in years — and MacRabbit’s CSSEdit 2.5, a significant upgrade to an already marvelous web design tool. And they’re not alone; many other companies have chosen this date to introduce major upgrades of their applications. It looks like Mac developers are starting to take ADA more seriously than before. I don’t remember a surge like this happening in 2006 or earlier.
“Wow” is the word to describe both Coda and the new CSSEdit. They will be no-brainer purchases to me, and I suspect countless others feel the same way. But where the Coda price of $99 (or less for a limited time) seems like a fit for the extensive feature set, CSSEdit’s $29.95 price point seems absurdly low. After all, both of these apps target the professional web designer — 90% of whom will be paying $600 or more for their Creative Suite 3 upgrades.
As it happens, Panic’s Coda release also solves an issue we’ve been pondering at MK&C the past few days: whether to use zip files for distributing Tiger-only software. Zip files are the seemingly the perfect app distribution method: they are standard, fast to unzip, and opened by Safari automatically. But somehow, despite an experience clearly superior to Internet-enabled disk images, zip files still felt un-Mac-like to me. But What Would Panic Do? Nothing un-Mac-like, that’s for sure.
CSSEdit is very nice, and you're probably right that it's underpriced. I think a lot of shareware developers get too hung up on the $20 - $25 price point, I think there's a lot of room above that, especially for applications targeted at professionals. I do think Adobe's pricing leaves a lot to be desired though.