• TextExpander support.
• Optional startup password.
• Settings are now accessed within app.
• New option to lock screen orientation.
• Sync service is out of beta and is open sourced.

myTexts, a new app from MOApp, caught my attention recently. It's another "distraction-free writing" app with some nice touches and a reasonable price tag. This genre of apps basically time-warps you back to the days of full-screen, menu-free, plain text word processing. The most popular of the comparable applications would be WriteRoom, which is in active development and, I believe, the original app in this category. myTexts adds some great touches to the idea.

First, myTexts uses a database to store your documents, with auto-save and auto-backup. Your entire document library can be searched, including the title, full text, document notes and user-assigned tags. Documents can be exported in a variety of formats, ranging from plain text files (.txt) to Word documents (.doc). You can even export XML/HTML. Tags assigned in the app are written to exported documents as OpenMeta tags, making Spotlight searching more efficient, if you're a "tag" kind of user.

Fonts and colors are customizable, although you only get two choices (shades of grey) for the background. There's a sidebar containing your document list, as well as notes and tags for the current document. Notes for the current document can also be popped up in a floating, always-on-top window which you can quickly paste to from other applications and which dims when not active. The sidebar automatically hides and can be triggered with a mouse-over, or you can disable the mouse trigger and call it only with a keyboard shortcut. There aren't a lot more features, but everything is keyboard-navigable and quite well-polished, especially for such a young application.

Like WriteRoom, myTexts is a Cocoa application and its editing area is fully-compatible with System Services, the OS X spell-checker and third party applications such as SpellCatcher X.

myTexts is available as a free trial, and can be purchased for 12 Euro (about $17US), making it slightly cheaper than WriteRoom (also downloadable as a free trial). If you're in the market, I'd suggest giving both apps a try, as they both have their own feel and features. The WriteRoom wiki lists a few other apps in this category, and I'm pretty sure WriteRoom 1.0 is still available as a freeware app if you don't want or need the frills.

Ross Carter of Cocomot has a pretty cool new word processor, Pagehand, in the works. It reads and writes in PDF format, so you don't have to think twice about sending a document to anyone; they may not be able to edit it -- depending on the software they're running -- but you're pretty much guaranteed they'll be able to see it exactly the way you did on your screen. That's important because Pagehand's features are heavily geared towards making correct and beautiful typography easy for everyone, and providing many of the advanced features you'd only find in applications such as InDesign or Quark. Ross demoed the word processor for me at WWDC. Check out the video for a brief overview of the application and some of the philosophy behind it. While it hasn't been "officially" released yet, it's available for download and trial in its 1.0 incarnation.

TaskPaper, a list management application from the author of WriteRoom, was recently updated to version 2.0. Back at version 1.0, it was an instant favorite among some TUAW bloggers. Beyond simple list management, it's really a very full-featured task manager which revolves around the idea of utter simplicity. It uses plain text files which become easily-navigated, well-formatted project and task lists within the application.

I've always appreciated plain text lists for their compatibility with, well, everything. They're malleable with just about any scripting language, copy and paste-able into everything from mind maps to online documents, and ever so simple to edit (I also had a lot of fun with the GTDAlt bundle in Textmate). Despite being loaded with new features, TaskPaper 2.0 maintains everything there is to like about working with plain text lists.

If you like AppleScript, though, you get an extra boost: TaskPaper's new AppleScript dictionary is brimming with classes and elements which alleviate the pain of AppleScript text manipulation. You can quickly and easily find tasks, grab selections, add and remove tags and more. Like Things, TaskPaper has an extremely flexible tagging system (including the addition of values to tags, e.g. @priority(3)) which, with or without script-fu, allows you to create a system which works for you.

The 2.0 release also improves on the interface, and brings those plain text lists to life with user-configurable styling. The new search syntax allows for complex searches based on projects, tags and tag values, in addition to text content. The drag handles and shortcut keys also add a level of elegance to the editing and use of your text-based lists.

You can try TaskPaper out for free, or pick up a license for $29.95USD. As further proof of my "compatible with everything" claim, check the bottom of the TaskPaper page for a list of compatible projects for Vim, TextMate, BBEdit, online task managers and even... Windows (sure, why not?).

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.