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 also — as you might expect — it 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 Hicks — the 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.