Using an iPad to maintain websites – my workflow

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my website managment workflow changing up a bit due to Panic’s recent announcement that they were discontinuing Transmit. To summarize, yes, Transmit will continue to work for the time being and Panic has stated that it will continue developing Coda for iOS. But they’ve been slow to adopt new iOS features such as drag one drop while plenty of others are already offering that support. So, I’ve been checking out my options.

After two weeks with the new workflow on the iPad I can say this was a great decision and I no longer consider it tentative or experimental. This is going to stick and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve moved Coda off my dock and into a folder. In it’s place are Textastic and FileBrowser. Not only is this going to work, it’s going to be much better than I expected. Here’s why.

iCloud Storage, FTP, Two Pane View
Textastic allows for my “local” file storage to be in iCloud. So, unlike Coda, my files are now synced between all devices. Next, Textastic’s built in ftp is excellent. And I get the two pane file browser I’ve gotten used to with Transmit and Coda. Local files on the left, server files on the right. The html editor is excellent and is, for the most part, more responsive than Coda. Also, and this is really nice as it saves me from extra tapping, uploading right from a standard share button within the edit window. Coda requires switching out of the edit window to upload changes.

Drag and Drop
Unlike Transmit and Coda, the developers of FileBrowser have implemented excellent drag and drop support. I’ve set-up ftp servers in FileBrowser and now it’s a simple action to select multiple files from practically anywhere and drag them right into my server. Or, just as easily, because I’ve got all of my website projects stored in iCloud I can drag and drop from anywhere right into the appropriate project folder in the Files app then use the ftp server in Textastic to upload. Either way works great. Coda/Transmit do not support drag and drop between apps and are a closed silo. The new workflow is now much more open and with less friction.

Image Display and Editing
One benefit of FileBrowser is the display of images. In the file view thumbnails on the remote server are nicely displayed. If I need to browse through a folder of images at a much larger view I can do that too as it has a full screen image display that allows for swiping through. Fantastic and not something offered by Transmit or Coda. Also, from a list view of either Files or FileBrowser, local or remote, I can easily drag and drop an image to import into Affinity Photo for editing. Or, from the list view, I can select the photo to share/copy to Affinity Photo (or any image editor).

Textastic and Files
This was another pleasant surprise. While I’ll often get into editing mode and just work from an app, in this case Textastic, every so often I might come at the task from another app. Say, for example, I’ve gotten a new images emailed from a client as happened today. I opened Files into split view with Mail. In two taps I had the project folder open in Files. A simple drag and drop and my images were in the folder they needed to go to. The client also had text in the body of the email for an update to one of his pages. I copied it then tapped the html file in Files which opened the file right up in Textastic. I made the change. Then uploaded the images and html files right from Textastic.

Problems?
Thus far I’ve encountered only one oddity with this new workflow and it has to do with this last point of editing Textastic files by selecting them from within the Files app. As far as I can tell, this is not creating a new copy or anything, it is editing the file in place within Textastic. But for any file I’ve accessed via Files it shows a slight variation in the recents file list within Textastic. Same file, but the app seems to be treating it as a different file and it shows up twice in the recent files list. Weird. It is just one file though and my changes are intact regardless of how I’m opening it. As a user it seems like a bug but it may just be “the way it works”.