BBEdit Update

For those that have auto-update notification turned off, BBEdit 8.2.4 has landed.

Fulltext search in Tiger Mail?

So, does fulltext search in Mail.app 2.0.5 (OS X 10.4.3) work for anybody else? Because it sure as hell doesn't work for me. Indexing Mail Messages is turned on in Spotlight prefs; I don't see any relevant options in Mail itself. From within Mail I can search for matches on From, To, Subject without difficult, but "Entire Message" mode yields nothing. Is this feature just broken?

Digging TextMate

I still remember being at CFP in 1996 and sitting behind some supercool geek who was using BBEdit to take notes. I imprinted immediately, and I was onboard with that wonderful application from 4.0 all the way to 6.5. Somewhere around 7.0, though, BBEdit began to lose the plot. Its transition to OS X had always seemed halfhearted, and all those buttons for generating HTML were looking very quaint. The menus and preference dialog had grown unwieldy, almost byzantine.

To make a long story short, after trying everything under the sun (really; I don't think there's a single native editor for OS X that I didn't fire up at least once), I switched to TextMate a couple weeks ago and am completely sold. It consistently works the way I want it to work and leads me to discover features I didn't know I needed. Its bundle system solves the cruft problem that's killing BBEdit, and provides an organized, accessible way for users to expand the app's featureset. It's a Cocoa app with a good native feel. I even bought it, which is a remarkable thing for a cheap, indecisive, open source guy like me to do.

PowerBook hibernation

Andrew Escobar has posted an informative page on enabling the new "Safe Sleep" mode that Apple made public (quietly) with the release of the latest PowerBooks.

Looking at Buying a PowerBook?

John Gruber does an very detailed review of his newly acquired 15" PowerBook. If you are on the fence about a purchase, you might take a few minutes and give this a read. It might help.

Sony's DRM kernel extensions

You probably read the recent news about Sony installing cloaked "digital rights management" (DRM) software on PCs. Well, Mac users don't have to feel left out any longer, because it looks like Sony discs also install DRM kernel extensions on the Mac.

Swell.

Of course none of this is a problem if you're just ripping audio, but if you're running some whizzy multimedia app from a CD, watch out -- especially if it asks for your admin password!

LaunchBar 4.1b1

Launchbar cultists take note: 4.1b1 is out. New file manipulation commands, Spotlight integration, more iTunes controls, and even Tiger dictionary lookup.