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.
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-mentionedTextMate 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.
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.
A while back we posted on the recently released book, TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac. Now the author of that tome, James Edward Gray II, offers a preview of the kind of stuff you'll find in his book in an article over at MacDevCenter.
Gray shows you how to customize TextMate by creating a bundle that turns it into a RPN calculator (the heavy lifting is done behind the scenes with Ruby). Bundles offer some amazing extensions of TextMate's core functionality, such as the BlogMate blogging plug-in we recently mentioned. If you've been curious about how all that cool TextMate bundle voodoo works (or you want a preview of the book), check out the the tutorial.
TextMate has a basic, built-in blogging bundle that provides some decent features. You can use a variety of syntaxes (HTML, Markdown, etc.) to pen your next digg-worthy post, and the bundle also has rudimentary support for retrieving posts from your blog to edit. It's not bad, but it isn't stellar either.
Todd Ditchendorf's BlogMate plugin, however, is stellar.
As a blogging interface for TextMate, the first thing you'll notice is that BlogMate isn't simply a bundle - it's a full-blown plugin, offering a palette with all sorts of control over your MetaWeblog-compatible blog (for now BlogMate has only been tested with WordPress, but in theory it should work with any of these blogging systems). As you can see, BlogMate can keep track of a configurable number of past posts, hook into your categories and even display previews with pictures of your posts. BlogMate can also handle multiple blogs for those who can't stop at just one (I'm looking at you, Scott McNulty).
Setting up BlogMate is a breeze, though I should probably mention at this point that it is a beta product, so I echo Todd's sentiment of backing up your blog's database just in case. Creating a new post is as easy as opening a new TextMate document and typing away, but there's a major difference from the Blogging bundle here: you don't need to insert a post title; you do that when you actually finish the post and click BlogMate's 'Send Post' button.
Managing posts is one area where BlogMate really shines, as editing a post is as easy as writing one - simply double-click any post in your list (and you can configure BlogMate to pull down more than the default 10 posts) to open it with all formatting preserved. Deleting a post involves nothing more than selecting a victim and pressing delete.
While you don't get some of the finer features of other blogging clients, BlogMate is already a pretty powerful plugin for the rocking swiss army knife text editor that is TextMate. Todd has done a great job here, and I hope enough interest builds to help make BlogMate worth everyone's while. If you're done reading and you're itching to get blogging, you can grab a copy and peruse more instructions and details from Todd's site here.
I'm a big fan of Twitter, and not just because I am on the top 100 Twitter user list (though that doesn't hurt). It is just plain old fun. I also enjoy the heck out of TextMate, which is also fun to use, though in a different way. Twitter and TextMate are two great tastes that, one would imagine, taste great together. Enter Muffin Research Labs (I never thought I would be writing that) with a new Twitter bundle for TextMate.
Bundles, you'll recall, are sets of files which extend TextMate's functionality. As you might have guessed the Twitter bundle allows one to Twitter from within TextMate. Once you have the Twitter bundle installed you simply select some text, hit ALT T, and off it posts to Twitter. Keep in mind that this bundle is a little rough around the edges, and it requires that you have PHP installed on your Mac.
In the market of Mac users who have text to edit, TextMate has become one of the household names that we turn to the most. Likewise for the blogging world, few - if any - services come to mind before WordPress. Brett Terpstra of Circle Six Design knows this, and that is why his AutoTag Bundle for TextMate seems to be such a match made in nerdy blogging heaven.
Brett's AutoTag bundle works with WordPress 2.1 and its Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to present a window (pictured) containing all the tags you've used on your WordPress blog; perfect for tagging your posts on the fly and helping you to keep your tag system tidy. But one might ask: what is an AutoTag plugin without some auto action, right? AutoTag can tag your post for you by scanning what you've written and comparing it against your tag database. Simply type 'auto' and press tab to watch the magic happen. And as if that wasn't enough, AutoTag even has a command for suggesting new tags, again based on a scan of your post's content or even Yahoo's Tag Suggestion feature. With all this clever 'auto' functionality going on, let's just hope Brett's next plugin isn't called 'AutoBlog,' or we might all be in trouble.
To give your TextMate + WordPress workflow a tagging boost, you simply need to install a UTW-RPC plugin for WordPress (available with the AutoTag bundle) in order for TextMate to access your database of tags. Setup is really simple, but be sure to download the version of AutoTag that corresponds to the version of TextMate you're running, i.e. - Cutting-Edge or the regular version available from the Macromates site.
The AutoTag bundle and UTW-RPC WordPress plugin are open source and available from Circle Six Design.
Some people balk at the idea of paying for a text editor. 'Doesn't OS X ship with a pretty good text editor called TextEdit,' they say. That is very true, but if you make your living creating text documents (whether they be code, blog posts, or content of some other kind) TextEdit just won't cut it.
Enter TUAW favorite TextMate. This program is the swiss army knife of text processing. It includes a number of features that make coding and writing a breeze. It is a complex application, and as such the learning curve can be a little steep. The Pragmatic Programmers latest effort, 'TextMate Power Editing for the Mac,' hopes to turn you into a TextMate pro. Author James Edward Gray II shows the reader the ins and outs of TextMate, and teaches you how to get the most out of this great app.
'TextMate Power Editing for the Mac' is available now. The physical book costs $29.95, the PDF version costs $20, and you can grab both for $37.45.
I spoke with the folks at the TextMate booth for a bit about the upcoming version. Yea, it's going to be Leopard-only, and we've been discussing why more and more devs are sticking with Leopard for their apps, but there's some pretty cool stuff on the way for TextMate. Beefing up support for version control software like Subversion, better Xcode integration and support for FTP are all on the way, though we still don't get an ETA since Leopard, strangely, is MIA.
I've previouslymentioned my text editor of choice is TextMate. I'm the first to admit that I am not a power user of TextMate, since I'm a word slinger not a code monkey. Lots of TextMate's features don't really come into play for me, but even if one discards the many features that help developers there is still lots to sink your teeth into. This avalanche of features is sure to intimidate new users, luckily our good friends at Circle Six Design have taken it upon themselves to enlighten us to some of TextMate's features, as well as give us the low down on how to make TextMate sing (in a metaphorical sense that is).
As if that weren't enough, Scott over at WishingLine whipped up a neat background image that features some of TextMate's keyboard shortcuts. What more can a prospective TextMate user want?
So what does this tell us about 10.5 and its impact on the Mac, both for developers and users? Sounds to me like there are some pretty ground-breaking changes in Leopard since, from what I understand, developers typically try to keep theirs doors as open as possible by maintaining backwards compatibility with at least one previous version of the Mac OS. Of course, this can vary depending on how difficult it is to keep these doors open, as well as whether the developer works out of an office or a living room.
Personally, this boosts my excitement for Leopard. If it changes things as much as developers keep hinting, 10.5 sounds like it'll be a fun ride.
Well, Merlin, you did ask. 
Way back in 2006 – after the excitement of the Midterm Elections and before the launch of the Wii – 
I love playing with 
The new 
Matt Webb likes 
Finishing up my interview series with notable Mac OS X developers is Allan Odgaard of 
A while back we 
TextMate has a basic, built-in blogging bundle that provides some decent features. You can use a variety of syntaxes (HTML, Markdown, etc.) to pen your next digg-worthy post, and the bundle also has rudimentary support for retrieving posts from your blog to edit. It's not bad, but it isn't stellar either.
I'm a big fan of 
In the market of Mac users who have text to edit, 
I spoke with the folks at the 
I've 
