I recently bought a new Mac, and I decided not to migrate years of cruft over to a pristine Snow Leopard install. I also decided to shed years of stale workflow and adopt a new way of doing things. Enter the power tools: software that augments the power and performance of OS X to do things faster and smarter. I'll examine some general system enhancements and look at a couple of powerful Mac/iPhone app combos that really work well together.

Step one was finding a replacement for my beloved QuickSilver. I had abandoned QS well over a year ago due to performance issues on most of my Macs, but after a nagging pain in my wrist surfaced, I realized I had to find more keyboard shortcuts. Enter LaunchBar, which fills in for 90% of what QuickSilver used to do for me. LaunchBar is one Ctrl-Space (configurable, of course) away from Spotlight searching, Google searching, application launching, math calculations and much, much more. LaunchBar is $25 around $35 per seat, and worth taking 15 minutes to learn the basics. Go ahead, hate me for giving up QS, but try LaunchBar before you hurl the insults.

Next I needed a better way to juggle 3 Gmail accounts. But I also needed a way to track the metric ton of inbox items that flow through those email conduits. The solution was the combination of MailPlane and Things. I had really dedicated my heart to Toodledo, but there's one trick I couldn't replicate on any setup (The Hit List included): when I get an email in MailPlane, I can select some text and press Shift-Ctrl-Opt-Cmd-0 and the Things HUD pops up and autofills the notes section with a link to the email itself. It is awesome. Not perfect, mind you, but a huge thing for me.

Read on for more power tools and tips.

For fans of Macromates' flagship text editor, TextMate, the current version may be all they need. For the last three years, TextMate has been stuck at version 1.5 (and change). In a blog post yesterday titled "Working on It," however, developer Allan Odgaard talked about what's coming in TextMate 2.0.

TextMate 2.0, according to Odgaard, is "taking shape" amid steady progress. It's not a small update, either: Odgaard says it's a "major undertaking with a long timeline" and he doesn't want to get people's hopes up about release dates or finished features just yet.

He says most of the modules for the application are nine-tenths complete, and he uses 2.0 day-to-day. The front end, he says, needs work, and an alpha release may be ready "before too long."

Here's a frustrating problem: You have InDesign CS4, and your buddy needs your file, but has InDesign CS2. "Easy!" you think, "just save an InDesign Interchange (INX) file and send it to him."

Lo, wonder of wonders: InDesign saves an INX file that's compatible only with the immediately preceding version of InDesign. (As I found out the hard way today.) CS4 saves a file for CS3; CS3 saves a file for CS2. If you don't have both versions on your computer, you're out of luck. Way to Quark it up, Adobe.

An INX file is just a glorified XML file. And Adobe, clever lads and lasses they are, inserted a version number in the file. Adobe CS2 looks at the version number, sees that the INX file is targeted for CS3, and pops up an error message without even trying to open the file. Curses.

But Mike Rankin figured it out last November: Open the INX file with your favorite text editor (like TextMate or BBEdit) and change the version number. Replace line number 2 (which looks like this):

<?aid style="33" type="document" DOMVersion="6.0" readerVersion="5.0" featureSet="257" product="6.0(352)" ?>

with this:

<?aid style="33" type="document" DOMVersion="5.0" readerVersion="4.0" featureSet="257" product="5.0(662)" ?>

Easy peasy. Open the INX file in InDesign CS2, and you're good to go. Use caution, though: This works best for simple layouts. The more complex your layout, the more likely it will unexpectedly change when re-imported into a lesser version of InDesign.

[Via InDesignSecrets.]

Changes.app, the ultimate Mac application used to track changes in folders and text files, was recently updated to version 1.5. This new version easily integrates with Coda, Espresso, BBEdit, TextWrangler, and TextMate. When you launch Changes, you will be able to install plug-ins directly into those application right from the Changes menu item.

There is a new HUD (Heads Up Display) that allows you to view changes from within the supported applications. Changes can also interface with Subversion, CVS, Perforce, Mercurial, Git, Bazaar, and Darcs for versioning control. With this new version, there is also built-in AppleScript support.

Even if you're not a developer, or don't use the applications or versioning control systems that are mentioned, you can still find Changes to be useful. Anyone, not just developers, may find it useful to be able to look for differences between two support files or folders.

You can download a 15-day free trial of Changes from their website. Single-user licenses are $49.95 each.

Special Promo Code
If you are planning on purchasing Changes, you can use our special promo code to get $10 (US) off the purchase of any license type. Just type in TUAWCHANGES15 at checkout. This special offer is good through April 15th, 2009.

I unabashedly love TextMate, and I love my TextMate themes. I do, however, spend a fair amount of time in Xcode, which is why I was excited to find XThemes. With a little bit of drag and drop, you can convert any TextMate theme -- in all of its splendor -- into an Xcode theme.

Yes, it's for a limited audience ... namely TextMate die-hards who also use Xcode frequently enough to miss the themes they love (and have probably spent a fair amount of time tweaking). If you fit into this niche, you'll definitely want to take a look. XThemes: $0. Feeling at home coding outside of TextMate ... priceless.

Sometimes I think Regular Expressions are like the tax code: if someone professes to know everything about them, they're probably not telling the truth. In reality, Regular Expressions (or RegEx) is a syntax to help you construct very precise search terms to find and replace bits of text in a variety of applications.

In applications like Coda, BBEdit, and TextMate, you can search for a "string" -- meaning just any old collection of letters next to each other -- using a Regular Expression. For example, I could search for the string "laugh" and it would show up in laughter, slaughter, and Laughlin.

While I can't show you everything about Regular Expressions, I can at least start you off. Keep reading for more about how you can integrate Regular Expressions into your workflow.

Everyone else has had just three choice Mac apps, but I'm going to claim four because two of my choices live in the Menu Bar, and are therefore very small. Only you and I need to keep count, though, eh?

Bean

This marvelous little rich text editor is an excellent tool for writing to word counts, something I have to do very often. Bean packs in a lot of great features, and the developer is responsive to feedback and suggestions.

Either TextMate or BBEdit

When I'm not writing to word counts, I'm usually using Markdown to write for the web. Until last week I'd been using TextMate for this, exclusively, for a couple of years. Now, with the release of BBEdit 9.0, I'm wavering between the two. Both are wonderful, and writing with Markdown just isn't the same without one of them to help me out.

I Love Stars

I'm one of those weirdos who likes to keep the Dock out of sight most of the time. I don't use it for launching or switching apps, and I don't use it to keep minimised windows in either. But there are some functions that I like to have in easy reach from anywhere, and that's why I'm a big fan of Menu Bar applications. That said, there's not a lot of Menu Bar to be had on a little MacBook screen, so I'm very picky about which ones get the honor of a place up there. I Love Stars earns a spot. It does nothing but let me assign ratings to songs, but in my opinion it does it very well and, most importantly, sits in the best place for doing it.

Jumpcut

Another one from the Menu Bar, and this time it's a clipboard history utility that saves my backside 27 times every week. At least. It only saves text, but that's fine for me because that's what matters most in my line of work. With Jumpcut running (and it's always running), I can merrily copy umpteen things from a dozen different places and be sure of pasting them easily, and in the correct places, in the text document I'm writing at the time (see Bean and BBMate raves above).

OK, that was five. Sorry.

It's been a while since TUAW talked about TextMate, and fans of the venerable text editor will want to check out ProjectPlus, Ciarán Walsh's latest contribution to the TextMate community. It provides a set of features compiled from several of Ciarán's other plugins, and then some, such as:

• SCM status badges for SVN and Git, displayed in the project file list and the window proxy icon
• Swapping the project drawer for a panel, ala MissingDrawer (can be disabled if you prefer MissingDrawer)
• The project panel can be placed on either side of the window
• Maintains support for ???D and ??R shortcuts
• Support for Finder color labels in the sidebar panel
• Color labels can be set through the context menu
• Preserving the project tree state on re-open
• QuickLook preview of files in the project file list through the context menu (or ?? when the file list is focused)
• Sorting options in the project file list context menu
  • Display folders at the top of the list
  • Sort by file extension
• "Open With" option

Subversion users might also want to take a look at SVNMate, also by Ciarán. Also check out some of the great contributions from Thomas Aylott, a.k.a subtleGradient. TextMate is an amazing text editor, but the contributions of the TextMate community are what make it my favorite text editor.

Well, Merlin, you did ask.

Having listed some imaginary iPhone apps he'd like to see, Merlin Mann asked the world: "What's the iPhone app you crave?" Hmm, let me see now - I've got a little list.

• Avant Go: A fantastic portable newsagent, in which you could download whole chunks of your favourite magazine and newspaper web sites for offline reading. I used to read dozens of articles in Avant Go on my train commutes in and out of London, back in the days when I commuted. It was an absolutely essential app and I'm very much looking forward to it - or something similar - arriving on iPhone.
• Yojimbo or Notational Velocity for iPhone: See yesterday's rant. If this, or something like this, isn't right round the corner, I shall eat my router.
• TextMate or Bean: This is dependent on Apple opening up Bluetooth to other devices in a future software update. If I could use a full-size external keyboard to quickly write text, I'd want a decent editor to write it in.

What iPhone apps are you craving? Let us know in the comments.

Way back in 2006 – after the excitement of the Midterm Elections and before the launch of the Wii – Hetima wrote MissingDrawer, a plugin for the oft-mentioned TextMate that took the standard-issue OS X drawer used by TextMate project file lists and turned it into an Xcode-like pane embedded in the edit window. It was lauded by many as a major improvement of the TextMate UI, but has gone pretty much untouched since then, perhaps because it was good enough for most users to begin with. But Jannis Leidel saw room for improvement.

The new MissingDrawer builds off of the original, adding some aesthetic UI tweaks along with some usability polish. On the aesthetic front, it increases the line height of the file list, shrinks the project buttons and tweaks the file list frame. A new resize method accompanies the Mail.app-style resizer handle and the position of the splitter pane is saved automatically now. And lastly, the panel now hides when using the Show/Hide Project Drawer menu item or shortcut.

You can download the 2008 MissingDrawer (including source code) at Jannis' site, and installation is a couple of double clicks away. TextMate users who liked the first version of the plugin will surely appreciate the touch-up. I know I do.

I love playing with TextMate themes. I tend to get bored easily, and besides a proclivity for dark backgrounds that impair readability, I'm always up for variety. That's why I'm pleased to see TM Themes, developed by Garrett Bjerkhoel, hit the TextMate theme scene. The site is starting out with a small collection of themes, but features a simple interface with rollover and full previews, a rating system, comment option and theme uploader. Hopefully it will become a good source for coders to find means of expressing their individual creativity, a trait which many don't realize is innate to the coding species.

The TextMate wiki offers a large collection of user-contributed themes, and there are other collections as well. For the most part, though, the themes are found individually across the web. It's fun to see collections coming together and TextMate fans providing services like this for other users.

The new .Mac Web Galleries are great, but they unfortunately can only be built by iPhoto '08 and integrated into iWeb pages. Thanks to this RapidWeaver forum post from Günter, however, RW users have a trick for embedding those slick scrolling .Mac Web Gallery thumbnails into their pages. The trick more or less involves creating at least one or more .Mac Web Galleries, opening iWeb and using its new widgets feature to embed one of your galleries in an iWeb page, publishing to a folder and copying the specific piece of .Mac Web Gallery code out of that iWeb page and into a RapidWeaver Blocks page.

It isn't exactly pretty, but I think I know of a way to simplify this process, at least for some of you. The way I figure it, if you're already publishing an iWeb page to your .Mac account with your galleries embedded in them, you can just open your iDisk and drill down to Web/Sites, find the page you published with that gallery code and simply grab it from there. No publishing to a folder and creating more junk to manage and delete, since you're already publishing those pages and code somewhere.

As far as looking at the code on those pages, you can of course simply open them in a browser and use the View Source command, or you can find a text editor like TUAW favorite TextMate or even the free Taco HTML. For more questions on this you can try in the comments here since I know a good number of TUAW readers are also RapidWeaver lovers, but the original RapidWeaver support thread where I found this tip might be a better place if you want to get more thorough answers faster.

Matt Webb likes VoodooPad, the desktop wiki application from Gus Mueller, but he does not like his data to be bound up in a proprietary format. So he's cooked up a bundle for the powerful TextMate text editor that allows him to create a plain text wiki. Basically the bundle allows you to create a main page in a project directory and then hyperlink to plain text files within that directory as the wiki pages. Furthermore, as Merlin Mann points out, this works perfectly with Quicksilver's plain text append and prepend actions. So if you're a plain text fan looking for a way to wiki, Matt's bundle is worth a look.

[via MacDevCenter]

Brett Terpstra at the Circle Six Design blog just can't seem to stop making cool stuff, especially when it comes to bundles for TextMate. You might know his work from other plug-ins and bundles such as his WordPress theming bundle we mentioned, as well as his most excellent AutoTag bundle for blogging to WordPress blogs.

Not content to work merely with words, Brett has created a FlickrMate bundle that offers an impressive suite of options for interacting with Flickr and embedding images in any HTML or Markdown document you're working on.


You can search the text and tags of just your photos, or across the entirety of Flickr. An 'upload and embed' command is also available for uploading a new image up to Flickr and either linking or embedding it in the document you're working on. You can also browse your own Flickr account with a simple viewer that organizes your photos by sets.

Basically: Brett made one of - if not the - coolest Flickr blogging plug-ins, which just happens to work with the powerful and flexible TextMate, and all he asks for any of his creations is a donation. If you find his hard work useful, I definitely recommend you show him some PayPal love.

Finishing up my interview series with notable Mac OS X developers is Allan Odgaard of Macromates, makers of the most excellent TextMate text and code manipulation app. Allan now joins Brent Simmons, Wil Shipley, Paul Kafasis and Gus Mueller in sharing some thoughts with us on the delay of Mac OS X Leopard, the iPhone and what it's like to develop on the bleeding edge.

Read on for my interview with Allan Odgaard.