DAN WEB DEVER The Bad points. • This program has had very little updates and is a regular crasher, even on the latest update as I write this (1.0.5) and inconveniently has a pop-up window saying it has an error and asks you if you want to report or ignore it (this happens a lot, not nice when you're working) and there should be at least a "Don't display this again for this version" check box as it is supposedly out of Alpha and Beta and Release Candidate (seems to me like its still in the alpha stage really). • The snippets Panel, although it looks nice, has a nice quick access and has potential, it is somewhat disorganised and can look quite messy when (if you're like me) write a lot of mini scripts and put them in the snippets panel for regular use. • Live preview is not always live and has issues multiple when you're editing the CSS (it DOESNT always DISPLAY IT) until you close the CSS from your workspace. Also, as other reviewers have mentioned it needs relative paths to work, quite a pain really. • The programs features don't live up to the standard they claim to be on the developers site. • Fast - this program is quite powerful and lightweight, it doesn't eat away at your system resources like most standard IDE's but has a lot of the power to compete. • The Interface is Clean, Simple (yet stylish) and Effective. Things aren't all over the place, in your face or in the way of your workspace, They're there when you need them and hidden when they're just not needed and therefore providing you with more space for to develop and code. • The Code navigator is wonderful, In my opinion its one of the best code navigators out there. Each tag, element, variable has its own simple icon so you can at a glance browse though it without having to read everything, also it shows you in a nice way how things are nested and highlighting things are easy just by clicking on them in the Navigator. • Quick Publish. It is exactly what it says, just by turning it on, whenever you save your file locally it'll upload / update your file remotely via FTP, Extra handy when working with files locally and remotely. • Espresso's FTP is surprisingly fast and when working on a large project (or even a small one), its merge / update features are especially handy. • Matching Brace Highlighting - One thing in Espresso that really shocked and horrified me when I first opened it was the missing Matching Brace Highlighting feature. Although its not a necessary feature, its a highly sought after (and handy) one and is very common even among the freeware coding applications, eg Smultron, TextWrangler and Komodo Edit. • Although Espresso has the handy feature of Syntax Checking for PHP (letting you know what line / error it is), you have to manually check though the contextual menu. Just something simple as a little red icon in the toolbar or a red underline on the line that has the error would definitely make this app quite special. (p.s. this Awesome feature is available in NetBeans [which is an amazingly powerful Free IDE] if anyone wants to know of an app that did that). Although this app is somewhat in the early stages of its life and its functionality / stability is somewhat funky and the pricetag is somewhat high for what it currently provides, it has some great potential to be a competitor in the Web IDE market.
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