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Bare Bones Software pulling next BBEdit from the Mac App Store
Over the weekend at the Çingleton conference in Montreal, Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software made a presentation in which he gave his reasons why the next version of his company's flagship product - BBEdit - won't be sold on the Mac App Store. For many people, this move seems counterintuitive. Wouldn't a developer want his or her app to be just a click away from purchase on the Mac App Store? As noted by Çingleton attendee and SixColors.com creator Jason Snell, Siegel wasn't frustrated with the things most people would believe were the reason for quitting the Mac App Store. It's wasn't Apple's 30 percent cut of profits, the lack of a relationship with his App Store customers, the marketing challenges or even the craziness of following Apple's submission guidelines. Instead, it was the cumulative effect of all of these frustrations, most of which occur at the end of the development cycle just before shipping a product. Siegel came to the realization that the extra stress and frustration just weren't worth the hassle of being in the Mac App Store, so for at least the immediate future, BBEdit will be available only from the Bare Bones Software website. Siegel doesn't count out the possibility of returning to the App Store in the future if some of the irritations are worked out. But at the present time, the company can concentrate on continually improving its popular editing app, keeping in touch with its customers, and developing new features without the extra added stress.
These are a few of my favorite things - 2013 Edition
As 2013 comes to an end, here are a list of my favorite Mac apps that I used over the past year. Now there are a few important things to remember: you'll notice that many of these are not "new" apps because, well, I don't care when the apps were made nearly as much as I care if they're good and I find them useful. Instead, this is a list of the apps that I used or enjoyed the most in 2013, and expect to keep using in the future. All prices listed are in US Dollars, rounded off to the nearest whole dollar (because we all know that 99¢ is just a marketing way of saying $1, right?). If there is no price listed, then the app/utility is free, although most gratefully accept donations. Favorite New App of 2013 Bartender ($15) is the app I never knew I wanted until it existed, and now I never want to use a Mac without it installed. Bartender lets you hide apps on your menu bar, as well as organize the ones you want to remain visible. You can even use it to hide built-in OS X menu bar icons such as Notification Center and Spotlight. I even use Bartender on my Dell UltraSharp 29" Ultrawide monitor which is essentially one monitor as wide as two monitors. Favorite App of 2013 Keyboard Maestro ($36) is my favorite "non-new" app of 2013. Version 6 came out in 2013 and the app is continually improved. The more I learn about Keyboard Maestro, the more I'm impressed with it. I have written about it a lot and posted several macros on Github. I've even done some one-on-one consulting and training. Even after all that, I'm still learning new tricks that it can do. (Peter Lewis, Keyboard Maestro's developer, commented that he's still impressed to see what users come up with to do with his own app!) Keyboard Maestro's cost may seem high in a world where software is often reduced to "fart-app pricing" but it does the work of several apps. It can launch applications, move and click the mouse, execute scripts, insert (static or dynamic/variable) text, manipulate windows, control menus, create/move/copy/rename/delete/trash files, control iTunes, capture images, control iTunes, send notifications, and more. Keyboard Maestro comes with a 30-day trial which is enough time to overcome the initial learning curve and start making it work for you. The developer is very responsive to questions and support requests, and there many others using Keyboard Maestro too, so you're likely to find more tips in the year ahead if you read their sites too. More Automation on the Mac Keyboard Maestro is only the tip of the automation iceberg. TextExpander ($35) and Hazel ($28) both continued to be essential tools in 2013. In case you're not familiar with them: TextExpander inserts text (or images, or runs scripts) on demand when you type a shortcut, and Hazel automatically responds to changes in files and folders. TextExpander is great if you find yourself needing to re-type the same thing over and over. I use it to insert frequently referred-to links, create templates for shell scripts or MultiMarkdown documents, and mail signatures. You can even "nest" snippets within other snippets. A Mac without TextExpander feels broken. Hazel can do so many things I don't know where to start, but here's one set of recipes I use more than any other. All of these are actions taken on files added to my ~/Downloads/ folder: If there is a new archived file (.zip, .tar.gz, etc) then unarchive it and store the original file in ~/Downloads/Archives/ (in case I want to copy it to another Mac). If a new .app file is found, move it to /Applications/ and replace any older version If a new text file is found (.txt, .md, .mmd, etc) is found, move it to ~/Dropbox/txt/ If another kind of document (.pdf, .docx, etc) is found, move it to ~/Dropbox/Documents/ If an image is found, move it to ~/Dropbox/Photos/ (where another Hazel rule then sorts them by date) There are lots of other possibilities, those are just a few to get you started. Hazel is one of those tools that works in the background doing tedious things so you don't have to. It will even keep your Trash from getting taking up space with old files or oversized files. Read more at TUAW All Hazel articles All TextExpander articles Most Taken-For-Granted App I Couldn't Live Without Dropbox. Good lord, I don't even want to think about using a Mac without Dropbox. Unless you have been literally living in a cave, you must have heard about Dropbox by now, right? If so, here's a summary: it's a magic folder which syncs to all of your computers (Mac, Windows, even Linux) which you can access on your iOS devices, and even on their website (unlike iCloud documents). It is supported by tons of iOS devices which use it for document sharing and more. You get 2 GB for free, and up to 500 GB for $500/year. All accounts come with 30 days of versioning so you can go back to previous versions of documents. Other Dropbox articles to check out: Get an extra 1 GB of Dropbox storage by syncing it to Mailbox Keep Dropbox.app up-to-date when the magic fails Finding Dropbox 'conflicted copy' files automatically All Dropbox articles on TUAW This Is Getting Really Long, I'm Going to Have to Summarize a Few of These: Sorry for the bulleted list. These are great apps, but they are either better-known or more easily explained (I hope!). This was the year I switched to Alfred ($0 for most features, $28 for "Powerpack" extensions, or a little over $50 for lifetime updates) from LaunchBar ($35). LaunchBar is still a great app, I just wanted to be able to use some of the workflow features in Alfred. Alfred, LaunchBar, and Keyboard Maestro all have clipboard functionality built-in, but if you want an app just for saving multiple clipboards, get Flycut. Even has Dropbox sync. MailMate ($50) definitely deserves its own review, and I suspect I'll be using it even more in 2014, but 2013 saw me start to move away from Gmail, especially Gmail.com which was redesigned but did not get better. If you use email, you owe it to yourself to checkout MailMate. OmniDiskSweeper ($0) remains my go-to app for finding out what is using all of my hard drive space. I'm still using version 1 of Skitch ($0) whenever I need to quickly take a screenshot then annotate and/or share it. Skitch version 2 has gotten better since its initial atrocious release but "saving" a Skitch in version 2 goes to Evernote instead of just staying locally, and I have no desire, need, or interest in saving Skitch to Evernote. Soulver ($12) is the first 'calculator' that I have really enjoyed using. I've never been great at math, I can't do a lot of calculations in my head. Using a regular calculator always left me frustrated, and half the time I wasn't sure that I had done the calculations properly. With Soulver, I understand regular real-life math a lot better than I ever have. That isn't to say that it doesn't have a lot of powerful options which are useful to people who are good at math. It does. But if you've never struggled with math, you can't understand what it means to have something like this. The word "empowering" has been overused to the extreme, but here it fits, at least for me. I bought the separate iPad and iPhone versions without hesitation or complaint, but I am glad to see that Soulver for iOS is now a universal app (currently on sale for $2). Need to turn a bunch of CDs or audio files into an audiobook? Audiobook Builder ($5). It will not only 'chapterize' it for you, it will also let you easily add cover art using any image file. Want to make sure your Mac doesn't turn itself off for a certain amount of time? Try Caffeine. GIF Brewery ($5) easily takes a video clip and turns it into a GIF. Use your Mac's keyboard for any iOS device (or any other Bluetooth capable device, including another Mac) using Type2Phone ($5). Growl ($4) still does a few tricks that OS X's notifications don't. Use PCKeyboardHack and KeyRemap4MacBook to make a hyper key. If you want to edit, create, or learn about launchd, get LaunchControl ($10, free unlimited demo). Hugely useful. Need to cut up an audio file, maybe to make an iPhone ringtone, or maybe just to trim it for some other reason? Fission - Fast & Lossless Audio Editing. I still haven't learned git but thanks to GitHub for Mac I've been able to fake my way along. If you use a calendar, get Fantastical ($10) for quick "natural language" entry menu bar access, and get BusyCal ($50, 30-day trial) for a better Mac calendar. Print from iOS to your Mac with Printopia ($20). You can save the file as a PDFs (or JPG or PNG if that's what the file was originally), or send them to any printer connected to your Mac. Default Folder X ($35, 30-day trial) lets you quickly jump to favorite folders, or assign specific folders as the 'default' for certain apps. This is another one of those tools that: a) feels like it should be built-in to OS X, b) when I use a Mac without this installed, it feels broken. Trying to monitor your Mac's bandwidth usage and prevent apps from covertly connecting to the Internet? Little Snitch ($35) is the tattletale little brother than those apps wish had never been born. SlimBatteryMonitor is a better battery monitor that OS X's own; MagiCal lets you easily create a menu bar clock that shows the time and/or date exactly as you want it; FreeSpace Tab shows available hard drive space in the menu bar; and I've stopped using all three in favor of iStat Menus ($16, 14-day trial) which also knocked OS X's Activity Monitor off my Dock. Of course I use VLC for most of my video-watching, including Blu-Ray discs thanks to MakeMKV ($0 for some features, $50 for Blu-Ray features, although they are free during beta see here for more info which is also what I use for ripping Blu-Ray and DVDs, almost exclusively via Batch Rip Actions for Automator which are capital-A Awesome if you are ripping lots of DVD/Blu-Ray discs. When I'm done I clean everything up using Name Mangler to get the filenames right and then I can watch my collection in the Plex Media Server. Last but not least I use Mountain ($2) to mount and unmount drives from the menu bar, Flashmount (see previous coverage) to quickly mount DMGs. and DiskWarrior ($100) to check and repair my disks. (By the way, DiskWarrior might be the most expensive piece of software on this list, but it's worth every penny. Get it to help fix little problems before they become big problems.) Looking Ahead Wow. That's a lot of great software. Here are a few apps that I'm keeping an eye on because I suspect they will be on next year's list: Shortcat (currently $16 during beta, planned $24 after): "Keep your hands on the keyboard and boost your productivity! Shortcat is a keyboard tool for Mac OS X that lets you "click" buttons and control your apps with a few keystrokes. Think of it as Spotlight for the user interface." let.ter ($4): "The tiny Markdown powered app just for writing emails." I've been using a send-only email app for 2.5 years now, but I like what I see so far in Letter. Recently released and still lacking some essential features such as multiple account support (which is planned for the nearish future), but I bet this eventually replaces what I've been using. Vellum is the new app that I'm most excited about. Anyone who has tried to make ebooks knows that it's a pain because each device has its own... "quirks." Serenity Caldwell likens making ebooks today to making websites in the late '90s when web standards didn't really exist or weren't implemented by the companies that made web browsers. Vellum bills itself as the tool to help you overcome the madness by letting you import a .docx file and export properly formatted books for iBooks, Kindle, and Nook. This is the next app on my "to test" list and I can't wait.
Replicating QuickCursor using BBEdit and Keyboard Maestro
QuickCursor was the first app I bought on the Mac App Store. It was a great utility which let you send text from any application to your favorite text editor, and then when you were done, it would send the text back from your favorite text editor to the original application. For example, if I was writing a lengthy response to a question on AskDifferent in my web browser but didn't want to lose my work if the browser crashed, I could use QuickCursor to write it in BBEdit instead. (If you're still not clear on the concept, watch the YouTube video for QuickCursor.) Unfortunately sandboxing killed QuickCursor, meaning that it could no longer be sold through the Mac App Store. Jesse Grosjean, the developer, released the source code on GitHub because he was not planning to continue updating it. (Can't say that I blame him after making a great-but-niche-market app for the Mac App Store, only to have Apple change the rules and make it impossible to continue selling it in the Mac App Store.) I am still hopeful that someone will revive QuickCursor as a non-MAS app, but until that happens, I needed a temporary solution. BBEdit and Keyboard Maestro to the rescue, again. My solution to this problem is called Edit Anywhere. It uses Keyboard Maestro and BBEdit to replicate most of the functionality from QuickCursor. (It would be possible to adapt this to other text editors as well. See the GitHub README for details.) If you use those apps, all you have to do is download and import the Keyboard Maestro macro (note: make sure Keyboard Maestro is running before you try to import the .kmmacro file). Also, you'll need to make sure that you have installed BBEdit's command-line tool. If you purchased BBEdit directly from Bare Bones, you can use the "Install Command Line Tools..." menu option as show in the image here. (If you aren't sure if they are already installed, go ahead and use the menu. It will tell you if they are installed and up-to-date.) If you purchased BBEdit from the Mac App Store, you will need to download and install the tools from BareBones.com. How it works (Overview) In Keyboard Maestro you will need to choose a keyboard shortcut to trigger 'Edit Anywhere.' I use Command+Option+Control+Shift+Q. (That might seems complicated, but I have remapped my Caps Lock key to equal Command+Option+Control+Shift, so all I have to press is Caps Lock + Q. See Brett Terpstra's "A Useful Caps Lock Key" for more information.) You can, of course, set the keyboard shortcut to be anything you want. The macro tries to determine if you have selected text in the current application. If yes, it will only use that text. Otherwise, it will select all of the text from the current application. That text will be 'cut', saved to a temporary file in your Home directory, and then opened in BBEdit. When you finish editing the file, simply close it and you will be taken back to the app that you were using, and the text will be pasted back into place. If, for some reason, the process does not complete successfully, you will still have the edited text on your pasteboard and you can manually paste it wherever you want. Also, after each temporary 'Edit Anywhere' file is used it is moved to your Trash, where it will remain until you empty it, in case you need to recover text from one of those files. How it works (Nerdy Detail Level) If you don't care how this works 'under the hood' feel free to skip this section. I provided it for people who might be curious how to make their own Keyboard Maestro macros. If you download and import the macro into Keyboard Maestro, you should be able to follow along as I explain each step. First the macro checks to see if there is a menu item named 'Cut' which is enabled. Most Mac apps have an "Edit" menu with Cut, Copy, Paste, and Select All as sub-menu items. This is a quick test to see if the user has selected text in the current application. It is not foolproof, but it will cover us for most of the cases, and when it fails, all it means is that we will send all of the text to BBEdit instead of just the selected text. If the 'Cut' menu is not enabled, then we can assume that need to do 'Select All' in order to capture all of the text from the current application. We do this first by trying the menu item "Edit -> Select All" and if that does not work, we fall back on ⌘ + A , the usual keyboard shortcut for 'Select All' in most apps. (Again, this is not foolproof, but close enough for our purposes.) Then I added a very short (0.2 seconds) pause to the Keyboard Maestro macro. When testing this macro, I found that some apps (notably Gmail compose 'windows' in web browsers) needed a little extra time to make sure that 'Select All' had selected all of the text. By trial and error I came up with 0.2 seconds which seemed reliable without adding too much of a delay. Next we 'cut' the text using the menu "Edit -> Cut" if it exists or ⌘ + X (the common keyboard shortcut for 'Cut' in most apps). Why 'Cut' instead of 'Copy'? Wouldn't 'Copy' be safer since it leaves the text in the original app? There are a few reasons: Sometimes you can 'copy' when you can't 'cut' or 'paste.' For example, you can select text on a web page, but you can't cut or paste back to it. Better to have the macro fail quickly than to offer to do something that won't work. If the selected text from the original application gets unselected for some reason (either because of some AJAX tomfoolery, or because the user pressed an arrow key or happened to click the mouse somewhere in the area), then when the replacement text comes back in, it might either a) intermix with the old text or b) be pasted in either before or after the old text. If the user happens to switch away from BBEdit while editing their text, and then went back to the source app and saw the original text, they might forget that it was opened in BBEdit and start making changes to the original text which is going to be overwritten when the revised text came back. It would be better for them to switch to the app and be surprised to see an empty window, which will hopefully remind them to check BBEdit. Although it might seem unsafe to 'cut' the text away, almost every single application will have an 'undo' option where they should be able to 'undo' the 'cut' and get their text back if something goes wrong with 'Edit Anywhere.' Now, as soon as we have cut the text, we save it to the file ~/.edit_anywhere.txt using pbpaste which is Apple's command line tool showing the contents of the pasteboard. Normally that file should not exist (we'll see why in a moment), but what if it does? Should we just overwrite it with the new content? Absolutely not, that might be leftover text that the user had forgotten was there. Instead, if the file exists, we'll append the new text to the file and then open it. That might give the user a moment of confusion, but it's easy enough to remove the text they do not want, certainly much easier than trying to recover overwritten information! Once the information is safely stored in the file, we will try to open it with /usr/local/bin/bbedit which is BBEdit's command line tool. (N.B. if you wanted to use a different tool other than BBEdit, this is the line you would want to change to something else such as open -W -n -F *YourAppNameHere* "$FILE" but then you would need to add a way to switch back to the proper application after you finished editing, and you would have to quit YourAppNameHere instead of just closing the window, which is all BBEdit requires. BBEdit's command-line tool is also smart enough to activate the proper app after it is finished. You can see why I chose BBEdit, especially since it is already my preferred text editor.) What do we do if bbedit fails, or doesn't exist? The macro checks the exit code of bbedit and if it is not 0 then it checks to make sure bbedit is where it is expected. If it isn't, we inform the user. If it is, we inform the user that although bbedit is in the right place, it did not work properly. We also send the error message to stdout using echo which Keyboard Maestro will show the user because the shell script action is set to "display results in a window." Then we open the ~/.edit_anywhere.txt file in the default text editor, using open -W -t. (See man open for more details.) Assuming that bbedit does exist successfully, the shell exits and Keyboard Maestro will read the contents of the file back to the clipboard (we could have done that in the shell using pbcopy < "$FILE"). Then the macro will paste using the Edit -> Paste menu item, if available, or ⌘ + V. Finally we run another shell script. This one looks for the ~/.edit_anywhere.txt and moves it to the trash (~/.Trash/) but first it renames it using the current timestamp (YYYY-MM-DD–24h.MM.SS) and removes the leading '.' from the filename so it can be more easily seen if the user opens the Trash by clicking on the dock icon. This also prevents old versions from being overwritten in the Trash, in case the user needs to retrieve one for some reason. It's a start 'Edit Anywhere' isn't a perfect replacement for QuickCursor and, quite frankly, I'm still irritated that Apple failed to work harder to find ways to help developers make the transition into sandboxing. Too many good and useful apps have been either abandoned or forced out of the Mac App Store because of Apple's sandboxing implementation. That said, 'Edit Anywhere' gives me most of what I needed as an alternative. I've only been using it for a short while, so there may be some weird bugs and edge cases out there, but I've tried to make it so that the worst thing that would happen is that you have to open your Trash and grab a text file. That said, I can't guarantee that you won't run into problems, so use as your own risk.
TextWrangler updated to version 4.5.2
As TidBITS kindly notes, TextWrangler has been updated to version 4.5.2, and the latest update is available for download right now. As you can see from the release notes, there are lots and lots of different bugfixes in this one, including problems with the Clipboard, various menu and display graphics, and some issues with saving and opening files. TextWrangler is, of course, the free "little brother" to BBEdit, but still a very powerful and capable text editor on its own. BBEdit itself was also updated recently, with the latest version numbered 10.5.4.
BBEdit 10.5 adds Retina support (updated)
Bare Bones Software's HTML and text editing program, BBEdit, has just received a sharp new update that adds a wealth of new features and improvements, as well as full Retina display support for Apple's latest MacBooks. Version 10.5 adds the ability to compare the current document against previous "Versions" for people running OS X 10.7 or later. It is also now easier to update image dimensions in HTML documents, as well as a bunch of other features. One that stands out is a new "Preview Filter" option which lets you run a live preview window of your document through a filter of your choice using any AppleScript, Unix executable, or shell script. For fans of MultiMarkdown this means that you can now create a "Preview Filter" that will let you see your document processed with Multimarkdown extensions, but the possibilities go far beyond that. You can read the full list of changes on the official website, and if you like what you see, you can pick up BBEdit 10.5 for US$49.99 via the site's store. (A previous version of this article referred to some existing features in BBEdit which, while present in 10.5, are not new features in this release.)
BBEdit 10.1.2 now available
The latest version of the acclaimed text editor BBEdit is out and available now, and as you can see on the official site, it features a whole host of fixes and updates to existing features. A number of crashing and bug problems have been solved, so the whole app should run smoother than ever before. BBEdit is a terrific editor whether you're putting together HTML and CSS, code in various languages, or just typing up to-do lists and quick blog posts. It's available in an individual license for $49.99, or you can get it in the Mac App Store for the same price.
TextWrangler 4.0: Now even better, still free
The good folks over at Bare Bones Software have just released version 4.0 of their classic and free text editor for Mac OS X, TextWrangler. I talked with Bare Bones head wrangler Rich Siegel a few weeks ago about what was set to come out, and the company has basically added a lot of great new features to a classic app. Siegel noted that the previous version of the app pre-dates OS X Lion, so it needed a bit of refreshing. TextWrangler 4.0 works only on Intel-based Macs running OS X 10.6 and later. They'll be shipping the new version through the Mac App Store and the Bare Bones site -- Siegel said they'd prefer to be shipping only through their own store, as the App Store tends to "isolate the customer from the developer." Under the hood, Siegel says the new version of TextWrangler has all of the major performance improvements that were built into BBEdit 10. You can now search and read text compressed inside of zip files -- to modify those text files, you'll still need BBEdit 10. Rich also noted that BBEdit is coming up on a whopping 20 years of life as a Mac app -- that's an incredible run for a Mac developer. Check out the press release below for further details on the goodies available in TextWrangler 4.0. Show full PR text Bare Bones Software Releases TextWrangler 4.0 Major Upgrade Highlights Advanced Power and Streamlined Interface BEDFORD, Mass. - April 10, 2012 - Bare Bones Software today announced the release and immediate availability of TextWrangler(tm) 4.0, a major upgrade to its high performance, general purpose text editor for Mac OS X. TextWrangler 4 introduces new editing and disk browser window layouts, switchable syntax color schemes, and seamless preservation of open documents on relaunch. In addition, TextWrangler 4 also includes a completely re-imagined Preferences window, new Setup window, a streamlined filtering and automation interface, new support for Verilog and VHDL, plus a new modeless "Open File by Name" feature with efficient search-as-you-type results. TextWrangler 4 includes other significant performance and user interface enhancements. In TextWrangler 4, the new editing window now presents a streamlined layout with easy, direct access to both open and recent documents. When run on Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), TextWrangler 4 also supports "Full-screen" mode and "any edge" window resizing. Upon quitting, TextWrangler 4 now automatically remembers the contents of unsaved documents, and restores them the next time it is launched. The completely re-imagined Preferences window in TextWrangler 4 makes customization easier than ever before. For example, a new "Text Colors" preference panel now makes it easy to create and switch between different color schemes. In addition, a new Setup window provides a central location to manage configuration, including FTP/SFTP bookmarks, grep patterns and file filters. Access to text filters and scripts is now streamlined, plus TextWrangler 4 now has the ability to treat AppleScripts, Automator actions and Unix scripts as co-equal and all may be used as text filters or run directly as scripts. Detailed information on changes and improvements implemented in TextWrangler 4 can be found at: For more information on TextWrangler, please visit the company's web site: TextWrangler 4 requires Mac OS X 10.6 or higher (10.6.8, or 10.7.3 or later recommended). All Mac OS X users may download TextWrangler 4 free of charge from the Mac App Store or the Bare Bones Software web site: Text Engine for the Mac Community --------------------------------- Crafted in Bare Bones Software's best traditions as a leading Mac software developer, TextWrangler is a powerful general purpose text editor. It features a clean and easy-to-use interface and a rich set of features for composing and manipulating text. Additional information can be found on the company's web site at: About Bare Bones Software, Inc. ------------------------------- Bare Bones Software, Inc. develops leading-edge power tools for the Mac. The company's passion for creating deeply functional software with a clean, effective interface has earned it devotion from Mac users worldwide, plus quite a few awards. For more information, visit . TextWrangler, Yojimbo, WeatherCal and the Bare Bones Software logo are trademarks of, and BBEdit and "It doesn't suck" are registered trademarks of Bare Bones Software, Inc. Copyright (c) 2012, all rights reserved. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. ==end==
TUAW's Daily Mac App: TextWrangler
Trawling through and editing code can be loveless task. TextWrangler is a free app from the Mac App Store that could make it just a little bit more bearable. Brought to you by Bare Bones Software, the folks behind Yojimbo and the incredibly powerful BBEdit, the free TextWrangler is pretty intuitive and feature rich. Starting out as BBEdit lite, TextWrangler is a fully fledged editor in its own right. You've got pattern matching, full search and replace, syntax highlighting for quite a few source code languages, code folding, which compresses the code down to a more manageable length, and many other text manipulation and batch processing features. The interface is pretty simple to navigate with most needed tools available via an icon or keyboard shortcut, plus there is some decent text color-coding that makes reading code a little easier. You can open and save over FTP and SFTP, streamlining HTML authoring. TextWrangler even has support for both AppleScript and Mac OS X Unix scripting, making batch processing easy. Whether you're looking for a decent editor for HTML, CSS, XML or anything else, TextWrangler is a great free starting point. If you're just looking for an editor for writing plaintext files, a replacement for TextEdit, or modifying XML, .plist files or something similar, then TextWrangler is more than up to the job. TextWrangler is available for free in a slightly limited form from the Mac App Store and in its full glory from the Bare Bones Software website and will work on Mac OS X 10.5 and up.
WWDC Interview: Bare Bones Software
In this interview, Neil Ticktin of MacTech talks to Bare Bones Software co-founder Rich Siegel about the WWDC keynote, and also potential issues with the Mac App Store going forward. Bare Bones produces BBEdit, TextWrangler and Yojimbo (see our coverage of Yojimbo here and BBEdit here). TUAW and MacTech Magazine teamed up to speak to developers at WWDC 2011 about the keynote announcements and how Apple's new technologies will help them and their customers. We'll bring you those videos here, MacTech.com and MacNews.com. Also, check out the free trial subscription offer for MacTech Magazine here.
BBEdit 9.5.1 out now
You lousy kids, with your iPhones and iPads and iGadgets! Back in my day, we worked on real computers, with real keyboards, and mice with one button, and we liked it! BBEdit is a relative relic of that age -- when text ruled the Earth, BBEdit ruled text. And the old Mac app is still being updated. The latest version 9.5.1, adds in a couple of dozen fixes, and reverts some of the capitalization rules to the way it worked in a previous version. There are still some die-hards who swear by BBEdit for coding or editing text, and because of its power and versatility, it's $125 for an initial purchase. The upgrade to 9.5.1 by current users is, of course, free. Nowadays, you've got your drag-and-drop and your touchscreens and your gestural controls, but BBEdit is one of the best apps that does what your computer used to be best at: editing text quickly and well.
Backups save the day after data loss
About 13GB of data was accidentally deleted from my account on my Mac yesterday. Fortunately, due to an aggressive backup system, I was able to recover all of the files. I was trying to test out a tip sent to the TUAW team, which led me to log into (and out of) the "Guest" account several times. One of the logins seemed to hang, which triggered a memory about a data loss bug in Snow Leopard which I had read about (and which Apple is now acknowledging in "extremely rare" cases, per Cnet). I immediately reached around the back of my iMac and shut it down. At first I thought everything was OK, but then Dropbox started asking me to configure settings, as if it was the first time the app was run. Fortunately, due to the new "LAN sync" feature in recent Dropbox betas, the iMac copied my Dropbox files from my MacBook Pro on the same network in a matter of seconds, rather than having to download almost 2GB of data from Dropbox's servers. I thought that was the end of the problems, until I saw that my Terminal customizations were missing. Then I noticed that a few other applications were not functioning correctly. Suddenly I realized that I had most likely suffered more data loss than was immediately obvious. Read on to see what had to be done to recover after the data loss occurred.
TUAW Tip: Saving InDesign CS4 files for InDesign CS2
Here's a frustrating problem: You have InDesign CS4, and your buddy needs your file, but has InDesign CS2. "Easy!" you think, "just save an InDesign Interchange (INX) file and send it to him." Lo, wonder of wonders: InDesign saves an INX file that's compatible only with the immediately preceding version of InDesign. (As I found out the hard way today.) CS4 saves a file for CS3; CS3 saves a file for CS2. If you don't have both versions on your computer, you're out of luck. Way to Quark it up, Adobe. An INX file is just a glorified XML file. And Adobe, clever lads and lasses they are, inserted a version number in the file. Adobe CS2 looks at the version number, sees that the INX file is targeted for CS3, and pops up an error message without even trying to open the file. Curses. But Mike Rankin figured it out last November: Open the INX file with your favorite text editor (like TextMate or BBEdit) and change the version number. Replace line number 2 (which looks like this): <?aid style="33" type="document" DOMVersion="6.0" readerVersion="5.0" featureSet="257" product="6.0(352)" ?> with this: <?aid style="33" type="document" DOMVersion="5.0" readerVersion="4.0" featureSet="257" product="5.0(662)" ?> Easy peasy. Open the INX file in InDesign CS2, and you're good to go. Use caution, though: This works best for simple layouts. The more complex your layout, the more likely it will unexpectedly change when re-imported into a lesser version of InDesign. [Via InDesignSecrets.]
Changes moves to 1.5, adds new features, gives TUAW readers a discount
Changes.app, the ultimate Mac application used to track changes in folders and text files, was recently updated to version 1.5. This new version easily integrates with Coda, Espresso, BBEdit, TextWrangler, and TextMate. When you launch Changes, you will be able to install plug-ins directly into those application right from the Changes menu item. There is a new HUD (Heads Up Display) that allows you to view changes from within the supported applications. Changes can also interface with Subversion, CVS, Perforce, Mercurial, Git, Bazaar, and Darcs for versioning control. With this new version, there is also built-in AppleScript support.Even if you're not a developer, or don't use the applications or versioning control systems that are mentioned, you can still find Changes to be useful. Anyone, not just developers, may find it useful to be able to look for differences between two support files or folders. You can download a 15-day free trial of Changes from their website. Single-user licenses are $49.95 each. Special Promo CodeIf you are planning on purchasing Changes, you can use our special promo code to get $10 (US) off the purchase of any license type. Just type in TUAWCHANGES15 at checkout. This special offer is good through April 15th, 2009.
TUAW Tip: Regular Expressions for Beginners
Sometimes I think Regular Expressions are like the tax code: if someone professes to know everything about them, they're probably not telling the truth. In reality, Regular Expressions (or RegEx) is a syntax to help you construct very precise search terms to find and replace bits of text in a variety of applications. In applications like Coda, BBEdit, and TextMate, you can search for a "string" -- meaning just any old collection of letters next to each other -- using a Regular Expression. For example, I could search for the string "laugh" and it would show up in laughter, slaughter, and Laughlin. While I can't show you everything about Regular Expressions, I can at least start you off. Keep reading for more about how you can integrate Regular Expressions into your workflow.
My favorite Mac apps: Giles' picks
Everyone else has had just three choice Mac apps, but I'm going to claim four because two of my choices live in the Menu Bar, and are therefore very small. Only you and I need to keep count, though, eh? Bean This marvelous little rich text editor is an excellent tool for writing to word counts, something I have to do very often. Bean packs in a lot of great features, and the developer is responsive to feedback and suggestions. Either TextMate or BBEdit When I'm not writing to word counts, I'm usually using Markdown to write for the web. Until last week I'd been using TextMate for this, exclusively, for a couple of years. Now, with the release of BBEdit 9.0, I'm wavering between the two. Both are wonderful, and writing with Markdown just isn't the same without one of them to help me out. I Love Stars I'm one of those weirdos who likes to keep the Dock out of sight most of the time. I don't use it for launching or switching apps, and I don't use it to keep minimised windows in either. But there are some functions that I like to have in easy reach from anywhere, and that's why I'm a big fan of Menu Bar applications. That said, there's not a lot of Menu Bar to be had on a little MacBook screen, so I'm very picky about which ones get the honor of a place up there. I Love Stars earns a spot. It does nothing but let me assign ratings to songs, but in my opinion it does it very well and, most importantly, sits in the best place for doing it. Jumpcut Another one from the Menu Bar, and this time it's a clipboard history utility that saves my backside 27 times every week. At least. It only saves text, but that's fine for me because that's what matters most in my line of work. With Jumpcut running (and it's always running), I can merrily copy umpteen things from a dozen different places and be sure of pasting them easily, and in the correct places, in the text document I'm writing at the time (see Bean and BBMate raves above). OK, that was five. Sorry.
BBEdit 9.0 released
BBEdit has released its eponymous BBEdit 9 text editor, a major update that includes a rewritten project manager, improvements to search and document comparison features, and a text-completion tool. Find and Multi-File search are now separate commands, both available from the Search menu. The dialog boxes are also now non-modal! Welcome to the 20th century. Also gone is the mysterious "don't find" button. Text completion appears much like the system-wide F5 trick: a pause will bring up a little pop-up menu of likely options. However, users can change the behavior to only show the menu with a click or keystroke. Also included in the update is improved language support for JavaScript, Objective C, Obj-C++, Ruby, and YAML. The release notes are enormous, and if you have any niggling irritations with prior versions of BBEdit, they may very well be solved. BBEdit is $129 for new users, and $30 for owners of existing licenses. Anyone who purchased BBEdit 8.5 and above on or after January 1 gets a free upgrade. [Via Macworld]
BBEdit version 8.7 released
BBEdit 8.7, the latest version of the triple-A HTML editor, has been released.Update: OK, so the reason I originally thought that all the "new" 8.7 features sounded familiar is because I actually was looking at the release list for version 8.5. The 8.7 release notice is here, and it includes Lua programming support, an option to remember which documents and browsers are open after closing BBEdit, and a Python language module and lots of other fixes and improvements. Sorry about the mistake, and thanks to all our commenters (and to Bare Bones Software themselves) for the heads up.8.7 is a free update for 8.5 and 8.6 customers. If you haven't picked up BBEdit yet, you can try out the free demo here.
BBEdit, TextWrangler updated
Attention, Bare Bones fans. Maintenance updates have been released for both BBEdit and TextWrangler. You can grab them both here. Since these are maintenance updates, don't expect new features or extra bells and whistles, just a general tidying up of things. Both are free updates.[Via Macworld]
BBEdit 8.5.1
Barebones has just updated the recently released BBEdit 8.5 (it is now 8.5.1). This is a maintenance release, but there are a few additions, mostly to snippets, so check it out. You can also be sure some bugs are squashed, and that stability has been increased.Text hackers, get to downloading!
John Gruber releases BBColors 1.0
John Gruber has released a command line tool called BBColors which allows BBEdit and TextWrangler users to save, reload and even share customized color schemes. BBEdit, like many code-friendly text editors, has offered a coloring system for some time, but it still doesn't allow users to save and swap out schemes for, say, different languages or simply different days of the week. John's free utility not only brings color swapping to these app's tool belts, but he also posted a few examples to help get your feet wet. DeviantART, eat your heart out.Instructions for installation and usage can be found on Mr. Gruber's project page for BBColors.
