Aug 29

BBEdit 9.0 Is Out!

As you surely managed to notice, I am not into Mac OS X software much, especially because things look quite different here, when comparing them to the Windows platform. In Windows, for most tasks, you get at least 4-5 outstanding programs, a bunch of excellent ones, and entire hordes of good, decent, and lower-class applications, but - obviously - it depends on the task. When talking about text editing, there are a lot of programs worth your money, or only your time - UltraEdit, Notepad++, PSPad, or EditPlus. Those were programs for Windows, as I said, but if we talk about Mac text editing, there's the basic and free Smultron I used to play with some time ago, some other ones, and the almighty BBEdit, our today's topic!

Above anything else, do you know what I like most about BBEdit? Its slogan "It doesn’t suck.®" is simply brilliant, in my opinion. Originally developed for Macintosh System Software 6 by Bare Bones Software, BBEdit is now the favorite tool of most software developers and Web designers working with Macs. Why? Well, this software is not a word processor, so text formatting and page layout features get out of question, but comes with native support for many programming languages, and power users can easily create custom modules to support syntax highlighting of any language.

This new version, 9.0, is a major update, coming with a lot of fixes and improvements, for example the nnew text-completion feature, improved search capabilities, the new Scratchpad feature that gives an extra place to throw temporary notes, the Projects feature, replacing the old File Groups one, and many more.

Unfortunately, BBEdit's problem is that, like most outstanding Mac OS X software, it doesn't come cheap - the full license is $129, while upgrades from any previous version cost $30; at least those who purchased BBEdit 8.5 to 8.7 on or after the 1st of January, 2008, are eligible to receive a free upgrade...