Software bonanza
It’s been a fantastic couple of days for great MacOS X software. First, Tinderbox 2.3 was released. The thing that immediately struck me was that the text is rendered much better, so notes are pretty to look at now. It seems like a minor point, but it was something that bugged me slightly before. There are a lot of much less visible changes to the kinds of attributes you can use, and to the actions and agents. I’m looking forward to digging a bit deeper into it in the next few weeks.
Then Ranchero Software released the public beta of NetNewsWire 2 and the new weblog editor, MarsEdit. NetNewsWire has some nice new features like Smart Lists (which work like Smart Playlists in iTunes), flagging of feeds and Search Engine subscriptions (so that you can search a huge number of feeds for entries on a particular topic). It seems to work very smoothly, and alsoâas you might expectâit interacts very well with MarsEdit. You can select an item in NNW and send it to MarsEdit, which opens a post with all the relevant URLs filled in. You can also set up a template so that entries generated in this way have a particular format. Both applications have gorgeous new icons designed by Bryan Bell and Jon Hicksâthe MarsEdit one is really cute, with a chubby little rocket orbiting a shiny Mars.
All I need now is for Macromates to release TextMate, and I’d be a really happy little geek.
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Curses! Now I'm going to have to play with TinderBox again - bizarrely, the nasty type rendering was a deal-breaker for me with previous versions, despite the concept appealing strongly. I'm not sure why: I think it bestowed the entire application a vague feeling of clunkiness, which somehow I never managed to overcome. Curious.
Thanks for the heads-up. I'm also waiting for TextMate with bated breath. I have a browser window open waiting for me to cough up for BBEdit 8, but I really really want indent folding without the cruft of jEdit.-----
I like the idea of Tinderbox, in theory. But, like Johnathan, the type rendering was a deal-breaker for me. I have trouble using any Mac application whose interface feels particularly un-Mac-like. (This is also the reason why, though I love its power, can't stand to use BBEdit.)
by Nathan @ 28/09/2004 5:09 am • Permalink •
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