Celebrity Interview: Simon Collison
Simon Collison lives in Nottingham, UK. He’s the Lead Web Developer at Agenzia Ltd., and since launching his personal blog, Colly Logic, in May 2004, the site has had over 5 million visitors.
Aside from all the XHTML, CSS and CMS stuff he earns a living doing, he also writes about such matters for Apress and Friends Of ED and sometimes reviews CSS-based websites for Stylegala. He does a bit of public speaking here and there, and will generally do anything for a biscuit and cup of tea.
1. What OS/platform do you primarily develop in?
No surprises here. Macs all the way — it’s all I’ve ever used. I always aim to have the very latest update of OS X, and can’t imagine staring at Windows all day. A little bit of site-testing on a PC is all I can manage.
2. What’s your (X)HTML editor of choice for coding websites?
I used to be a slave to BBEdit, and do still make use of it for complex coding tasks. I also edit my dynamic files within my preferred CMS (ExpressionEngine) which has an inspired templating system. However, I mostly edit files in Transmit. I’m a huge fan of Transmit, and as I like to work very fast, editing in my FTP client suits me perfectly.
(As a side note, I’ve also been playing with TextMate since this morning — it’s superb. I’ve imported an EE tags bundle which is very helpful.)
3. How did you decide on this as your primary editor?
The need for speed tipped the balance. With each new release of Transmit, the editing features became more intuitive for me, and although nowhere near as feature-rich as BBEdit, I do like to work with as few applications as possible. Transmit ticks a lot of boxes for me, and does what it should simply and efficiently.
4. What’s the one (or more) feature of the software you couldn’t live without?
The little Transmit van icon — it’s so sweet. Or, to be serious, I’d have to say it’s the DockSend option for favorite connections. Just select a favorite destination, choose “Save as droplet” from the Favorites menu, and then drag the droplet to the dock. Any time a file needs to be uploaded, just drag it to the droplet, and Transmit will upload it, whether the connection is open or not. Brilliant.
I also love the tabs for multiple connects, and being able to preview images and attain their dimensions with the preview drawer. Of course, I can also choose to open files in BBEdit for more complex editing tasks.
5. If you were in charge of choosing new features for this piece of software, what feature(s) would you add?
I guess I’d add more powerful text editing features to Transmit, so that I wouldn’t need to open files in BBEdit. Advanced find and replace, line numbering and auto-generated markup would all be useful, although I really am a stickler for hand-crafting my own code character by character.
6. Bonus Unrelated Question: What’s the best book you’ve read in the last year?
Books? Reading? I have no time! I have six shelves of unread books. A friend bought me Rip It Up And Start Again – Post-Punk 1978-1984 by Simon Reynolds (.com|.ca). It’s a fat tome detailing all that’s great about British noisy music through the punk era and beyond. I have a week off next month, so maybe I can finally get stuck in to that. I like books about music as I can make them interactive by sticking the music on whilst I read about those that created it. The last book I actually read was “South” by Ernest Shackleton (.com|.ca). Now there’s a brave man…
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