Congratulations to Allan Odgaard on winning the 2006 ADA for Best Developer Tool with TextMate. It is most definitely a well-deserved win. TextMate is the best general development text editor on Mac OS X today. So good, in fact, that it wooed me away from my long-time companion BBEdit in January. Alan has been pouring his lifeblood into TextMate, and that level of devotion and dedication really shines through in the final product.
TextMate, much like BBEdit, is built around the idea of a strong Text Engine and a powerful API for building extensions on. BBEdit was born in the days of Macintosh System Software version 6. It has grown and matured over the years and is still the best editor for big text files (as well as a number of other categories). But it still has holdovers from the old days. For example, the main way of extending BBEdit is by writing a plug-in using the C-based API. The main method of extending TextMate is through scripts in the language of your choice (Bash, Ruby, Python, Perl, etc.). The BBEdit extensions have to be compiled and then moved into the plug-ins folder, and then BBEdit has to be restarted before you can use it. TextMate lets you edit its extension scripts right in TextMate and your changes are applied immediately. TextMate has a level of dynamism throughout it that simply wasn’t possible back in 1991.
I hope the fact that not only is there a serious contender for BBEdit’s crown for the first time in about a decade, but that the contender is now getting the ‘big-time recognition’ it deserves, spurs Bare Bones into refocusing BBEdit. I want to see them updating the app from its core assumptions through to the layout of its dialog boxes. I want a new, leaner, meaner, code crunching, byte kicking BBEdit to win the Development Tool ADA in ‘07. And I hope that that spurs Alan on to build TextMate into an even better text editor. And that that spurs on Bare Bones, and so on, and so on. So that, in the end, text editing on the Macintosh is a level of nirvana never imagined by the minds of men…
Note: I’m basing the congratulations on
Gruber’s reporting of the ADA results. If he’s mistaken, or has swerved me, I will be forced to burn my Daring Fireball t-shirt or something.
Posted on 8 August 2006 in Uncategorized
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Last year I said there would be no Intel Macs. This year I’m typing this on a 2GHz Intel Core Duo powered MacBook. So that’s my track record so far.
This year, the only confirmed feature of the keynote is a preview of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. I think that’ll happen. I also think there’s a good chance the developers in attendance will be give preview discs just as they were when Tiger was previewed. I don’t think Leopard is going to have a built-in virtualization environment. It will have a 1.0 version of BootCamp, but running two or more OSes simultaneously will be left to Parallels, VMWare, and friends. Quartz 2D Extreme will probably be enabled by default. The Kernel will remain Mach, and Apple won’t switch to ZFS as the primary filesystem.
As far as hardware goes, I expect to see Intel-based replacements for the Power Macs (probably called Mac Pros) and the XServes (probably called XServe Xeon or something in the same vein, but catchier). I was also expecting a Bluetooth Mighty Mouse at WWDC, but that came out about two weeks ago.
So, that’s it, short, direct, and to the point. Hopefully I manage to improve upon my 0 for 1 record this year…
(One last prediction: 10.5 will feel snappier than 10.4 on the same hardware. But possibly only on Intel hardware.)
Post Keynote Update
- Leopard Preview. Correct.
- Developer Preview discs. Correct.
- No machine virtualization. Correct.
- Quartz 2D Extreme enabled by default. Unknown.
- No switch to ZFS as primary file system. Correct (pending changes before release).
- Mach remains OS X kernel. Correct (pending changes before release).
- Mac Pro announced. Correct.
- Xeon-based XServe announced. Correct.
- ‘Brings teh snappy.’ Unknown.
Two unknowns due to Steve not mentioning them, and everything else is correct. That’s a much better result for this year. Maybe I’ll try going out on a limb come January…
Posted on 6 August 2006 in Uncategorized
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