One of the benefits that occurred with Mac OS X is the inclusion of free, robust development tools like Project Builder (which later became Xcode) and Interface Builder. The inclusion of these tools with every Mac marked a major shift in philosophy on the part of Apple to a more developer-friendly environment. This has encouraged the growth of a number of small developers who have put out some really spectacular software in a very short period of time. Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try and point out some of the really notable organizations in the Mac development community, and hopefully introduce you to some software that will make your life a little easier and more fun.

The first developer I’d like to point out has been a mainstay of Mac development for far longer than just Mac OS X: Bare Bones Software, Inc, which has been developing for Apple machines since 1993, when they released an application called BBEdit. BBEdit is a clean, feature rich text editor that quickly became popular among anyone needing precise control over their text.

Something that I should clarify: while some features have been added as the application evolved, BBEdit is not a word processor. The difference between a text editor and a word processor is an important one:

A text editor is a piece of computer software for editing plain text. It is distinguished from a word processor in that it does not manage document formatting or other features commonly used in desktop publishing. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_editor)

Basically, the point of a text editor is to get down to the core text of a document, which is often necessary when doing any sort of programming (including HTML).

Bare Bones didn’t stop at BBEdit, however. In 1997, they released a robust email client called Mailsmith, which offered a number of organizational and filtering services well ahead of competitors. In 2001, they released an enhanced file information gathering utility called Super Get Info, which serves to augment the normal information displayed in the Get Info panel built into Mac OS X. in 2003, they released TextWrangler, which is essentially a “light” version of BBEdit that is currently available for free (you can find a comparison of BBEdit to TextWrangler here). Finally, in 2006, they released Yojimbo, which is an information organization and management tool.

On a personal level, I have been an avid user of BBEdit since I first received a copy of BBEdit Lite packaged on a CD in the days before most of us had an internet connection. In the course of other work, I’ve had to learn command line text editors like vi and emacs, but if I can help it I continue to use BBEdit for the majority of my text editing needs. This was further aided by the inclusion of a command line bbedit utility that can be used from Terminal in Mac OS X to open a file in BBEdit — incredibly handy when mucking about with hidden files in the system! In general, I’m able to open any file I want to throw at it. I’ve opened text files that were several hundred megabytes, and random files of unknown file type or extension. It’s one of the beauties of BBEdit: it will open just about anything; if you’re not sure what a file is, try and open it in BBEdit, and you’ll be able to at least peer inside.

The one drawback to the Bare Bones suite of software is the price — generally, there are other options out there (some of which we’ll be addressing in future installments) that are less expensive, with a relatively comparable feature set. This is the primary reason I’ve not used Mailsmith, Super Get Info, or Yojimbo, though I’ve certainly considered them all after my favorable experiences with BBEdit.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 3rd, 2006 at 9:00 pm and is filed under AppleTalk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.