BBEdit 8. Yes, it's worth the upgrade price. Cory had to change his drawers after he upgraded. Of course, he should have at least cross-posted that here, but he's busy so I'll give him a break. You don't have to though ;-)

It's not all fawning praise though, Andrei Herasimchuk is wondering why the icon still sucks. (Update: Jon Hicks graciously provides a better icon.)

John Gruber, the Daring Fireball that he is, leads the way with a codeless language module for apache config files. Although he admitted that he had a head start with a beta copy of 8, but that's okay. We'll let him slide on that one.

Related Links:

• Technorati search
• New in BBEdit 8.0
• Product tour

OS X and scanners...boy, I don't know.

I recently has the displeasure of trying to get a Microtek i320 USB scanner working with OS X 10.3.5. I'll take most of the blame, as I was the one that didn't check a single online review. Bad Pat, no doughnut!

This was by far, the most vile piece of software I have ever installed on an OS X box. I'm not exactly a novice and I pride myself with being able to trudge through even the worst software...but when you suspect the drivers of destroying your laptop display you know you are in for trouble. (Right now my trust TiBook is chained to an external monitor, but that's another story.)

So, as with most hardware you buy, the install CD is usually out of date. Again, something I should have checked, but didn't. So I download the latest and greatest from Microtek. It wasn't much better, in fact, it was just as bad. Now I'm sure a few of you are thinking that I'm a few gigs short of a terabyte for thinking that Microtek had anything to do with my display going out on me. But every time the drivers would load the external display would shut off as well. I only repeated this enough to be positive it was happening when the USB drivers were loading, lest I destroy my only CRT.

So I trotted back to BestBuy and picked up a HP scanjet 3970. It works fine. But I've noticed that scanning software for OS X doesn't really stack up well compared to it's Windows counterparts.

If you have a NetFlix account, you should really play around with Netflix Freak, a native OS X app to do things with your Netflix account that you probably never even thought of doing (like viewing your entire rental history). You may balk at the price, $15, but you can play with it restriction-free for 30 days.

It's not often that software gets posted about without the poster having tried it ("how's never? is never good for you?") but I just came across a posting for a sweet-sounding Pref pane called teleport over on MacUpdate that sounds fantastic and is getting great reviews:

teleport is a simple prefpane utility to let you use one single mouse and keyboard to control several of your Macs. Simply reach the edge of your screen, and your mouse teleports to your other Mac! The pasteboard can even be synchronized between the computers.

I've been wanting something like this for a long time and it seems like the sort of thing a lot of FA: OSX readers might find really handy; I think I'll fire up the old G3 and give this thing a spin....

If you try it, let us know what you think.

Well, I've been "contributing" here for two whole years now. A big thanks to Cory for adding me to the team. Things has been rather sparse around FA:OSX lately. Maybe all the migrations that are going to happen have happened. Naw, that can't be!

How can we serve you, the reader, better? I know we all try and put content here when we feel that it's relevant, but there may be a lot of stuff that we aren't posting because we don't know that you would find it relevant. So, feel free to drop some hints in the comments if you're feeling a little -v today.

More Python stuff: Bob Ippolito is starting to work on py2app, intended to be a Macintosh equivalent of py2exe (which makes standalone Windows executables from Python programs). Cool project. Somebody help him!

incessant popping noise revisited: after much general mucking around and some poking and prodding I think I've narrowed the cause of the popping noise down - removing the headphones from the headphone jack after I've closed the lid on my laptop and put it to sleep.

As long as I remember to unplug the headphones before putting it to sleep the problem doesn't seem to appear when next I wake it up.

Yet more proof that when it comes to programming languages anything can beget anything else if you just try hard enough, Cocoa#, Cocoa bindings for Mono. OS News has some screenshots and of course the ob./. post: Mono's Cocoa# Underway, GTK# Takes on Windows.Forms.

At work I'm digging in to learn C#. At home I continue to learn Obj-C. Could this be my chocolate+peanut butter?

If you're having trouble downloading the latest Xcode update from Apple, grab the BitTorrent .torrent file and have at it the new-fashioned way.

Growl is "a global notification system for Macintosh OS X. This allows any application to send it a notification" which is then displayed with unified UI guidelines. Sofar there's Python, Perl, and command-line support but it looks like any language could easily hook into it. [via Tao of Mac]