★★★★★

website iTunes

iPad only

pros: powerful text editor with integrated ftp client and html preview

cons: ftp client lacks some needed tools, no syntax-highlight customization

Until Panic get around to releasing Coda for iOS, this is the best replacement I've found for doing hand-coded web design on iPad. It's what I used to design the food security site I mentioned recently, and I've found the html preview function to be a great way to quickly prototype both my html structure and my stylesheets, switching from code to preview in a flash. Coupled with a hardware keyboard, this makes the iPad into a pretty fierce mobile web-design machine. With this setup, I'd feel content to travel for long periods without a Mac, and not fear that I'd risk neglecting any of the sites I maintain.

However, there are a few issues that give me pause, or at least have proven frustrating. First, if you're used to using Coda along with a local copy of your site, you'll have to do without any php or database with textastic - the html preview is great, but it's no apache server. Second, if you do need to preview something hosted on an external server, like you can in Coda, you'll again be out of luck - Textastic relies on a fairly frustrating workflow where changes to a downloaded document are autosaved locally, but must be manually uploaded to the server, and all previews within the app are only of the local copy, so you'll have to switch back to a browser to test anything that depends on that database or php. On the more niggling end of complaints, while recent versions have included previews of image files and other non-text documents you may have in your folders, the default behavior is to attempt to open them as text files with a warning - why not open as an image by default instead, and make open-as-text the multi-step option? Finally, because the syntax coloring isn't what I'm used to in some file types, I find myself wishing constantly that there were some way to customize this.

Altogether, though, Textastic is a workable, attractive option for anyone looking to do hand-coded web design on iPad, and the developer has clearly put a lot of care and effort into the app. I hope some of the wrinkles are ironed out in future releases, but even if they're not, I'd still recommend it as a buy.