Two Decades of Productivity: Vim's 20th Anniversary
The vi text editor was originally created in the late ’70s by Bill Joy, an early BSD developer who later went on to cofound Sun Microsystems. The original implementation of vi was conceived as an interactive “visual” mode for an ed-like line editor called ex. It was developed at first on an old ADM-3A terminal, about a decade before computer mice became ubiquitous. Users relied on commands and keyboard-based navigation to interact with the editor.
While I don’t consider myself a vi expert, nor a heavy user, once the discussion gets to the vi vs Emacs, I’m in the vi camp.
Developers Explain Changes in Growl 1.3, but Miss Important Aspect
MacStories published a short summary of the explanation provided by Growl’s developers about the mess in Growl 1.3.
Unfortunately the summary missed one very important aspect in the devs’ post:
Out-of-date applications don’t work with Growl 1.3 - Due to the changes in Growl 1.3 in order to get Growl into the App Store, some applications currently do not work with Growl and will need to be updated. Some applications have already updated to address this problem. If you are a developer who requires assistance with these changes, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help. Users can use Growl Version Detective to help mitigate this problem, but long term changes need to come from developers.
I’ve used the Growl Version Detective (you can get it from this page) and I haven’t found any application on my system that is compatible with Growl 1.3.
While I do understand the reasons for pushing out the new version as early as possible—and I payed for Growl to support its future, the Growl team has made a terrible mistake: they broke compatibility with older applications. I’m pretty sure they could have thought of workarounds that would not have disappointed exactly the people that hurried to support the dev team.
Day-O
Not only does it look nicer than the OS level clock, but it provides a tad more functionality.
WriteRoom 3.0
Somebody should stop me.
Luckly WriteRoom 3.0 is not expensive: $9.99 in the Mac AppStore.
If Google Reader Changes…
Considering there was never an official API, if Google Reader will make radical changes, does it mean that it will break all the apps we came to love—Reeder (Mac, iPhone, iPad), Pure Reader, Mr Reader, River of News? That’ll be just a new way for Google to piss off some more users.
I couldn’t find a better way to say this than MG Siegler’s comment about Google products:
And I’ve spoken with that team a number of times behind the scenes about other issues. Nothing ever gets fixed. In fact, it often gets worse.
Multimarkdown Composer: Yet Another Mac Markdown Editor
If you thought we’ve already got enough Markdown editors on Mac, just add another one to your list Multimarkdown Composer. This one comes directly from Fletcher Penney, the guy who extended Markdown into MultiMarkdown. At first glance the app looks like an extended version of TextEdit with support for syntax coloring and auto-generating syntax. And it integrates very well with Marked.
As a user of a custom Markdown/MultiMarkdown syntax, I’m missing the option to configure MultiMarkdown Composer processor. But I hope it will come with a later version.
Multimarkdown Composer is selling at a special release $7.99 price in the App Store.
Hidding Purchased Apps in App Store
If you are playing with a lot of applications either on the Mac or your iOS devices, the list of purchased applications just gets longer and longer. But I noticed that you can remove apps from the App Store:
Was this feature there before?
iTerm2 Tips & Tricks
Probably known by many of you, but some of these were new to me:
- Search: Cmd+f
- Autocomplete: Cmd+;
- Paste history: Cmd+Shift+H
- Instant replay: Cmd+Alt+B
- iTerm2 Exposé: Cmd+ Alt+E
- Support for many of the readline bindable commands:
- Ctrl+a: beginning of line
- Ctrl+e: end of line
- Ctrl+f: forward 1 char
- Ctrl+b: back 1 char
- Ctrl+l: clear screen
- Ctrl+p: previous history
- Ctrl+r: history reverse search
- Ctrl+d: delete current char
- Ctrl+h: delete previous char
- Ctrl+w: kill the word behind point
- Ctrl+k: kill text from the point to the end of the line
I’ve also defined a go to beginning/end of a word.
Any other tricks you know?
Growl 1.3 in MAS: Paying to Break Compatibility
Paying $1.99 for Growl 1.3 to break compatibility with quite a few programs.
Trillian needs an update if it’s not working. Also make sure you have the Growl preferences enabled in their preferences.
Skype is going to need an update from Skype to make Growl notifications work again.
The list can go on for a while. And that’s not the only issue with this release.
I went back to 1.2.2.
Update: Just to clarify, I was not posting this because I payed $1.99 or because the new version is basically broken—both these issues would be solved by an upgrade. But the thing that put me off was reading that Growl’s devs consider normal to break the app protocol—Growl is useful only as long as other apps are using it— and release it in the wild without giving a chance to the app developers to upgrade— actually the new Growl SDK is not even released. And all these leaving aside the customers’ experience.
TextMate’s Rewrite of the Boy Who Cried Wolf
They cried TextMate 2 at least three times already: June 2009, January 2010, and September 2011. But people are ready to pay for it again.
When migrating to Lion, I’ve made the decision to leave TextMate behind. Even before that I’ve been trying to get rid of it by learning to use MacVim. Then on Lion, I got BBEdit and I’m still learning it.
Even if TextMate 2 will actually become available at some point and even if I’ll get it for free, I’m not going to use it. And even if I’ll figure out BBEdit is not the best solution for what I need, I won’t go back to TextMate. I’ll try Sublime Text 2 next and then any other text editor that is alive and that gets updated on a regular basis.
Alfred File Search Filters: Alfred vs LaunchBar
With the Search Filter Extension you can easily set up keywords that trigger a special, limited, type of search that will filter out where and for what file types Alfred looks.
Starting today I’m giving LaunchBar a try. What I’ve discovered is that it supports a similar feature, but it doesn’t seem to be as configurable as Alfred’s.
While it’s too early to write about it, my first impression is that while both these apps are offering the same functionality they took opposite routes to achieve it.
