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BBEmacs Watch Part 1000

Daring Fireball Linked List: BBEdit 9.2:

My favorite new feature is the Sleep command, which lets you quit the app while saving state. When next you launch BBEdit after sleeping, all open windows and documents are restored, including untitled documents.

I wish every app had this feature.

You’ll never guess which prominent multiplatform editor has had this feature for some time, and didn’t even need to give it the throughly stupid (as well as completely inaccurate) name “sleep.” Which editor is left as an exercise for the reader. Is BareBones just working their way through the *info* screens?

Update: desktop-mode can also be set to auto-save the desktop while you’re working. What happens if God forbid BBEmacs crashes?

Some deal, Amazon

From an Amazon “deal” in my inbox this morning:

So the Mac version of PShop Elms costs more? The version that’s a full point behind the Windows release? How can I resist. Not. Almost makes me want to buy the PC version and run it in VMWare Fusion. But then you have to deal with Windows “UI.”

YABR (Yet Another BBEdit Rant)

TidBITS Home Macs: Ten Surprising Uses of BBEdit:

There are undoubtedly other ways to do any or all of these things; all I’m reporting here is that I’ve noticed myself reaching for BBEdit to do them, even though, as I say, BBEdit isn’t my choice for editing text. At $125, BBEdit is pricey for just these tasks, and I’m not recommending a purchase for these reasons alone.

It’s damn pricey for any tasks, seeing as how pretty much all its “features” have been in Emacs for probably at least the last 5 years. Yet year after year, the BBEdit lists are full of ‘OMG the keywords are GREEN! BareBones iz Teh Brilliantest!’ As far as I’m concerned, Aquamacs makes BBEdit even less attractive. Given the ridiculous prices for even minor upgrades and its Dark Ages level of programmability (good luck waiting for that Processing Codeless Language Mode, I mean syntax coloring) BBEdit more and more looks mainly like the clueless Mac fanboy’s choice.

Applescript made sane

Graphing Your Favorite Feeds with NetNewsWire and Ruby :: dot unplanned:

After the election, my list of feeds in NetNewsWire became the source of some consternation. I’m still not completely recovered from the “must … know” paranoia that grips me, so I’m loath to unsubscribe to the political stuff: What if the world starts to end? How will I know?

mph has been doing some very interesting posts about using Ruby as a potent antipsychotic for Applescript. Here he builds graphs of attention scores for his feeds in NetNewsWire. I need to do this myself – too many damn feeds. Interesting and fun series. Check it out.

The wheel, reinvented

TidBITS Business Apps: BBEdit 9.0 Adds Something for Everyone:

Another related feature that has changed significantly, and for the better, is BBEdit’s Find Differences. In BBEdit 8.5, Bare Bones added the capability to display which characters within a line were different between two similar files. That was huge for us, since it enabled us to use BBEdit in conjunction with the Subversion version control system to work with TidBITS articles. Though code may have relatively short lines, a line of prose is a paragraph, and without knowing what within a paragraph has changed, knowing only that two paragraphs are not the same isn’t particularly helpful. In BBEdit 9.0, Bare Bones has enhanced the Find Differences feature such that it not only shows the changed lines, and the changed characters within each line, it also lets you see and replace individual spans of differing characters within each changed line.”

Ediff much? Every time a new BBEdit release comes out we hear how innovative the latest round of stuff they’ve stolenadapted from Emacs is. Def not coughing up the $30 for this, folks.

Via Gruberworld.

Technorati Tags:
emacs, bbedit, mac

Free as in “you can get it in black”

Free Microsoft tools for scholarly communication:

• This is for real. Don’t mistake the Microsoft research division, which doesn’t sell anything, for the Microsoft product divisions. Tony Hey believes in open access and open data, and is putting Microsoft resources behind them. For background, see Richard Poynder’s interview with Tony Hey (December 2006), and my previous post on the Microsoft repository platform (March 2008).
• The new tools are free of charge. The announcement doesn’t say they will ever be open source, but Microsoft encourages open-source tools in the open chemistry projects it funds. So it’s possible.

Not cross-platform, though. I can’t take any Microsoft division seriously on open anything until they make tools like this simultaneously available on Macintosh and other platforms. Till then, it’s all just marketing bullshit. Apple’s not perfect in this wise, either; but open from Microsoft usually means “loss leader.”

(Via Open Access News.)

Technorati Tags:
geek, mac, open access, microsoft, open data, oss

Deeply tindertwingled

Grand Text Auto » Programs Ted Nelson Likes: “When I pressed him to mention any programs – including small-scale ones like games – that influenced him, he said he wasn’t a game guy and just mentioned some other ‘full platforms’ that aren’t computers: Tinderbox, Emacs, and Flash.”

2 out of 3 ain’t bad. Which 2 I mean is left as a really simple exercise for the reader. I wonder if Mark Bernstein’s seen this?

(Via.)

UPDATE: He’s seen it.

Technorati Tags:
mac, emacs, tinderbox, hypertext, ted nelson

2-bit world

A little play this morning:

Man, System 7 rocked. Anyone got a copy of HyperCard somewhere?
I was creating a system disk to use with miniVMac and dragging and dropping floppy image files on the emulator window. Virtual floppy swapping. Weird.

Technorati Tags:
apple, mac, minivmac, emulator

Speaking of NetNewsWire

Since I’ve been less than complimentary about NetNewsWire in the past, I thought it only fair to say that I’ve returned to using it as my primary newsreader. I decided to take yet another look because of all the stories on Newsgator’s making it free; since I’ve had a paid license since somewhere back around version 1.0, this wasn’t my primary reason for trying it again.

As to my biggest gripe with the software, the absolutely horrible syncing with NewsGator online, I solved that problem by opening a new Newsgator online account and simply importing my Google reader subs into that new account. So far it has worked well. I’m not entirely happy that the only way to get it to work right was to start completely afresh, but it is what it is. Overall, though, I’m glad to be using NetNewsWire again.

Technorati Tags:
apple, mac, rss, netnewswire, nnw, feedreaders, newsgator

Unity for Mac

I was looking at the OmniFocus forums yesterday, trying to figure out a way I could sync the app between my work and home machine (I spend a lot of time thinking about this sort of thing) and there was a post from Tom Negrino on how he does it:

I’d like to sync OF between my MacPro up in my office (where the app and its database lives) and my MacBook down in the house, but I’m not going to try to figure out rsync to do it. I don’t even have OF installed on the MacBook, but I still use the laptop to enter and edit info in OF when I’m not in my office.

How, you ask? Both machines are running Leopard, and I use Leopard’s Screen Sharing to view and work with the MacPro’s screen from the MacBook. It works great.

I used some of the tips from Macworld’s Screen Sharing article to improve the sharing experience.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1310…harepower.html

This works easily for me because my house and office are on the same LAN, but I think it will work over the Internet, too, though you may have to fiddle with router settings.

Until the Omni folks deliver their own sync features, screen sharing does it for me.

And I sort of like this idea, with 2 exceptions:

1. I don’t actually use OmniFocus on the iMac, the only machine I have running Leopard, and
2. I find it kind of clumsy to have to switch to that damn window every time I want to use the app.

And then it hit me, thinking about that recent post about NYPL and Mac virtualization, is that what I really want is Unity for Screen Sharing! Wouldn’t it be great if I could run an app on another machine but have it be just another window? X11 does this, right?

Well, VMWare guys, are you listening?

Technorati Tags:
apple, geek, mac, vmware+fusion