A snippet, in terms of coding, is a small piece of code that you can use over and over again in various projects. So as a developer (or designer for that matter), it’s useful to have your snippets readily available while you’re working on your next big project.
This is where CodeBox comes into play. CodeBox is a snippet management tool that allows you to quickly access, add and make modifications to your snippets with ease.
Features
Collecting a snippet is made easy, all it takes is one click of your mouse. All you have to do to add a new piece of code is give your snippet an appropriate name and then you simply enter your code, hit save and you’re done. With literally one click of a mouse you have stored a snippet of code that you can have access to in pretty much any application you can find for Mac OS X.
This app is feature-rich and also gives you the ability to sort and manage your code. CodeBox has some pre-defined categories in which you can sort your code into and the developer has defined some programming languages such as C, PHP, HTML, Objective-C, Python; the list goes on. In fact there’s over 20 different pre-defined programming languages.
Usability
Codebox is definitely a simple application to use and the developer has ensured that you can store your code as quickly as possible and that you’re not distracted by some unnecessary features that would make the software bulky.
Accessing your actual snippets of code couldn’t be simpler. You can either access you code from within your CodeBox library, into which you can copy your code, edit the code in your default text-editor, send the code in Mail and share it with your friends and colleagues, or you can access it via the menu bar, which we’ll come to later.
User Interface
The user interface allows you be efficient and it doesn’t waste any time. You have a clean sidebar down the left side of the window that contains all of your folders and categories. There’s also a sub-window near the top that contains your actual snippets and gives you access to them. Finally, you have another panel towards the bottom of the window that is the snippet itself – here, you can edit the snippet.
Main Interface
CodeBar
CodeBox also comes with a handy feature – the ability to access your snippet library from your menu bar. This is especially useful if you’re working on a project and need to quickly access your snippets; simply head to the menu bar icon, search for the name of your snippet and click Paste and you’re code will fall into the application you’re working in.
CodeBar
Areas for Improvement
Within CodeBar you can reveal a snippet and edit it. When editing a snippet, you’re given a heads-up-display dialogue of the application and, in my opinion, this isn’t the most perfect method and I’m sure the developer could’ve incorporated CodeBar’s edit feature in a more elegant way.
Editing a snippet within CodeBar.
Another thing about CodeBox that isn’t perfect is the idea of actually having to save your library as a CodeBox file on your hard drive, I believe that this is just unnecessary and I’d much prefer to have the my snippet library simply saved within the application automatically, without the need of a file to manage my snippets.
Conclusion
CodeBox is available from the Mac App Store for $9.99 and overall, CodeBox is a pretty solid application and is something that many developers will be able to make great use of. However, for me at least, I tend to forget that I have the application and don’t really use it during my development work. But maybe I’m just waiting for a feature that will really make this application great, I’m just not so sure what that feature is. Aside from that, CodeBox is a well-built and designed application and I can see CodeBar being exceedingly useful to many developers.