At version 8.5 BBEdit offers quite a surprise, too. The interface has been extensively modified and simplified for both the application and its preferences. For most programs a mention of changed preferences would be a bit silly, but as BBEdit has such an extensive preference set that its preference panel can actually be considered a part of its everyday operation.

Why the new version is numbered 8.5 instead of 9, up from 8.2 is a mystery. Bare Bones offered a .5 upgrade once before when BBEdit was made OS X native. That made sense. That was an important code porting effort but version 6.5 of BBEdit didn’t have a lot of new features over the old 6.

This update is a totally different animal. Besides an interface makeover, BBEdit added some welcome new features. The two most immediately obvious are code folding and menu bar customization.

Code folding, long a selling point for BBEdit’s main competitor TextMate and included with the latest version of Dreamweaver, is great. Toggle a little triangle and blocks of code fold up to un-clutter the workspace. Besides cleaning up a full page of code, the folding feature makes it easy to find closing tags and brackets, or the lack thereof. Its inclusion in BBEdit marks some serious catching up in an essential feature.

The other obvious change is in BBEdit’s new ability to toggle menu bar items. Use subversion or CVS a lot? Switch on a menu list and have it right there for you. Clippings, previously Glossary now has its own menu, which makes it easy to assign keystrokes to invoke commonly used snippets of text or code. Clippings are now easier to access and edit, too. As with most features in BBEdit, these are language sensitive.

Speaking of languages, BBEdit now offers syntax highlighting for Ruby, SQL and YAML. These were available as plugins before but it’s nice to see them incorporated into the core program. Bare Bones is now on the Ruby bandwagon, a place where TextMate has been the main Mac contender.

BBEdit’s already superior search functions have been improved too, adding PCRE and the ability to search and edit .gz files. It offers better JavaScript support, too, though I haven’t had an opportunity to use it yet. I have glanced at the excellent documentation and am looking forward to doing so.

Bare Bones claims almost 200 improvements and new features for BBEdit 8.5. The few I understand had me on the phone within an hour of downloading the demo to purchase my upgrade. Bare Bones forgot to update their shopping cart to include the new version and announce prices. That’s been taken care of but how embarrassing.

This is a major and badly needed update to a fine program that was falling behind in modern features. It has me back firmly in the BBEdit camp.

I liked what I saw. It was time to update and clean up one of my sites. Might as well try out the demo.

It looks like an FTP program. No surprise here. We see the modern two pane view with local directories on the left and the server on the right. There is no obvious way to reverse this, which doesn’t bother me. That’s how I’m used to working. Feature buttons have obvious icons and one touch I like is that the icons default to “Use Small Size” by default. It is easy to close the local view and use the program as another finder window, if you prefer.

This as a professional level webmaster’s tool. All of the expected power features are present, such as Mirroring, Remote Editing, Filtering, AppleScriptability, etc.. It also has a keyboard commands for almost every function, a nice touch.

Yummy supports both column and list views making it very easy to navigate through a site quickly. Since I first saw this feature I have considered it mandatory for my FTP program. It’s well implemented here and fast. Yummy supports several navigation options. Besides the column view there are the traditional forward and back buttons as well as a pull down menu that shows the entire path to the current window. The list view allows sorting by name, date modified, size and kind. The latter is nice because it sorts directories by folder first then alphabetically. Windows FTP clients sort that way and that was one of the few benefits of having to work on Windows for a while.

Yummy offers some other excellent features. A File menu command makes it easy to set a desktop alias to a remote folder. Then adding files to your server is a simple drag and drop. Yummy FTP starts up and does its thing then auto quits. Simple and elegant. Desktop Watcher attaches a folder action to any folder and auto uploads and datestamps files. It has folder synchronization and scheduling.

Yummy FTP works well with Rendezvous, making connections with local network servers automatic. Like a good Cocoa app it stores bookmarks and passwords in Keychain. It is possible to select the default local folder for a connection, though that is not immediately obvious. I had to first create a connection, then select it in the bookmarks window, then click the Advanced icon. It works. However, since I always keep mirrors of websites in my Home folder I would like to see the option in the default Bookmarks Edit pane. That’s just a quibble though. I don’t move my sites around on my hard drive so the extra step doesn’t come up more than once a site.

Yummy also has a file preview button. Previewing is so fast that I’d never know I was viewing a remote file. It’s a really nice to be able to see that remote image, that I can’t quite remember or to view the code of any text based file. In column view, the right most column works just like the finder giving file size and type.

Right clicking (That’s right – right not Control click. Come on Apple. Make a two button trackpad) on a file gives an excellent selection of options, like Add Favorite, Create Alias, New Folder, Get Info and more. It’s as complete a listing as any I’ve seen. I’m a big fan of contextual menus and like this one.

I do have a couple of small quibbles with Yummy FTP. Yummy has made the application opening display a bit too cute with it sort of unfolding as panes and drawers activate. It’s fun the first time. It’s annoying after that. I’d like to be able to turn that, ah, feature? off in preferences. I would also like to be able to set my double click option to edit files. Transmit has recently added remote image editing and I’d like that in Yummy FTP too.

Yummy FTP is fast. I gave up on Transmit a year ago because it would slow way down while uploading any file larger than 45-60 KB. It seems that Macintosh OS X (System 9 is fine) does not handle FTP as quickly as possible. Yummy FTP must use a different transfer engine. It also runs uploads on more than one file at a time, which noticeably speeds up multi-file transfers. FTP programs spend a significant amount of their time shaking hands with the web server and it’s nice to have several files moving at once so the pipe is always used. Also, I get a bit more bandwidth from my ISP while running multiple uploads or downloads than with a single file. I don’t know if this is particular to this situation or the way all cable systems work.

The user manual is a Wiki on the Yummy website. That makes sense but I’d like to have a local copy. The quick start guide is adequate for experienced FTP users.

Conclusion:
This is a solid program, well thought out. It has a solid feature set. Best on Mac speed and ease of use make it a good choice.

Yummy FTP
Publisher Yummy Software
$25 shareware – 15 day full demo
Yummy FTP requires Mac OS X 10.3 or higher

Value: 5
Features: 4
Documentation: 3
Ease of Use: 4
Stability: 5
Macness: 4

Highly Recommended

You could haunt the CSS designs sites and forums. You could buy a bunch of CSS books and spend months (years?) practicing. Or you could get yourself a copy of WESTCIV’S StyleMaster. It won’t completely erase the need to use other resources but it is the single best tool around to both learn and use CSS.

StyleMaster has been around for years, and it has always been a pretty good program, but it is only with version 4 that it has become a truly excellent. The Smart Preview view is a unique feature that allow you to click on any part of a page and show you in the left pane what CSS attributes apply to that section. Clicking also outlines all other page elements that are controlled by that selector. A popup window also open that shows browser compatibility with your CSS. A panel on the bottom of the window show you compatibility with different browsers.

Starting with version 3 StyleMaster took an evil turn and used sheets and drawers that opened and closed with each selection, a behavior that drove me crazy. Unfortunately, with version 4, the Properties editor still has that annoying drawer opening and closing. In the Windows version the pane simply changes as any normal contextual palette should. The animation takes measurable time and drives someone like me with ADD up the wall.

Now that I’m done with my rant, I can say that even on a complex page it isn’t necessary to switch properties too often. And it is a pretty minor annoyance. I still prefer the Windows version, though, like most Windows programs, it does have too many buttons on the toolbar.

At $60 StyleMaster is twice as expensive as any other Mac CSS editor. For that extra you get Smart Preview with X-Ray and the best documentation I’ve seen with any shareware software. Period. This is not just a tool to help you write CSS. It is a design tool that helps you style pages.

StyleMaster is nicely customizable. I especially like the ability to have it write code in the format I set. It will display your page in a any browser on your system, and allows you to turn panes on and off. It has another feature I like a lot: code competion.

It also has some Wizards that will help you build common web page features like bread crumbs, navigation bars and full page layouts. These seem to write solid code and can save time with the rough framing of a page design.

It is not all about page layout, of course and StyleMaster has all the typographic features you’d expect.

To use StyleMaster as a layout tool, it is helpful to write the HTML for the page first, then style it. Doing so helps enforce a beautiful separation between layout and markup. You can take a shortcut and use the Layout Wizard to rough things in.

Once the HTML is in place, StyleMaster make it relatively straightforward to apply CSS to your page. I say relatively because CSS has a number of gotcha’s, especially when dealing with Internet Explorer on Windows. No surprise there.

I have a couple other minor quibbles with StyleMaster. It really helps to have a large monitor to use Stylemaster with 3 panes and a drawer open. I do a lot of scrolling on my iBook. I can’t see any alternative to that. There is simply a lot of information showing at once.

And the new StyleMaster icon looks like a copy of Firefox. It looks like a mirror image at a quick glance. Navy blue and orange seem to be the geek colors du jour. You’ll notice that if I have to get this petty to find something to complain about, WESTCIV has written a very nice program.

Publisher: WESTCIV
MacOS X 10.3 or higher
$59.99

Features: 5
Ease of Use: 4
Value for Money: 4
Documentation: 5+
Macness: 4

Highly recommended.

Now Ecto has built in Rich Text editing. Wordpress on which this blog is running has a built in WYSIWYG editing. I’m covered twice for text formatting. Why should I bother pre-formatting my text with Markdown.

Now I would like to say that I prefer the clean markup that Markdown produces, which is much less verbose than that produced by either of the other options. And that is true as far as it goes. I try to be picky about clean code and absolutely standards compliant web pages. I’m not fanatic about it though. Honestly, mostly there is good enough for me. My templates validate and if the text thrown in by a WYSISWYG editor is a little funky, I’m not going to lose any sleep. Anyway, that’s reason number one.

What’s more important to me is that Markdown is a much faster faster way to write. By knowing a handful of Markdown tags I can format my text totally from the keyboard. Actually, the most common tags like those for paragraph and lists work automatically with line breaks or manual bulleting or numbering.

Things like headings are a simple matter of throwing in a pound sign or coming back and underlining the text with an equals sign. Precede a block of text with a greater than sign and you have a blockquote, and so on. This isn’t a tutorial. There is thorough documentation at the website.

As a Perl script, Markdown can be run from the menu of either BBEdit or it’s free little brother, TextWrangler. It might be possible to run it in other editors that execute shell scripts. I haven’t checked.

It is also possible to run either Markdown or Textile as an OS X service. That would allow you to write in TextEdit or another OS X Services aware application.

Markdown plugins are also available for major blogging systems like Wordpress and Movable Type and content management systems like Mambo and many others. For me it’s just faster to type the text in TextWrangler, convert it and send it to Ecto (Services again) to post.

If you want to try it out, Gruber has provided a web dingus that will run the script and spit out the coded text.

Markdown started out as a Perl script to implement Textile, a Humane Text Generator, which is the brain child of Dean Allen. And Markdown will accept Textile syntax. However, Markdown has added some formatting conventions that Textile doesn’t recognize. Some people love Textile. I learned Markdown first and developed some non-Textile standard habits. Textile is also available as a plugin for most blogging and Open Source CMS’s.

Markdown will also work in conjunction with SmartyPants, which turns plain text punctuation into “typographically correct” text with “curly quotes” elipses and more. It too works in BBEdit or TextWrangler or as a plug-in to many blogging systems. It is nice but I’m boring enough to not care much.

If you feel like mixing HTML in with your Markdown, no problem. Markdown is smart enough to honor your code. Mostly. Always double check.

1. You can use subscription services.
2. You can program your own.
3. You can deploy already developed applications.

The first is by far the easiest. Find the services you want, rent them and either add them to your site or use them as your site. Yahoo Stores, Backpack, Constant Contact and many other fee based services can get you up and running quickly. This kind of service is especially good if you are just breaking into a market.

The inevitable downside is that, unless the service fits your needs exactly, you have less flexibility with such services, than with the other options. It is also more difficult to brand your product. The service is the service and will look just like it does for everybody else who uses it.

I’m going to skip the write your own part. If you have the where withall to do so you are beyond this article.

Your third option is to use a pre-designed web application. For many uses this gives you the advantages of not having to pay a fortune paying for custom programming or taking months to rollout. Since there is a much greater variety of web programs than there are services, you are also likely to find a closer match to your particular needs. Also many web application allow you to use templates to customize the look of the product to match the rest of your site and promotional material. Or you may just want to make it look cool.

To customize and set up a web application it is generally helpful to do it on either your own computer or local network. That means that you have to have a fully configured web server to work with.

We’ve all heard that OS X comes with the Apache web server built in and that you can turn it on with just a checkbox in Sharing Preferences. That’s true as far as it goes. Unfortunately for any kind of real development the built in server is sorely lacking.

Most web applications require you to use a programming language like PHP, Perl or Python. Your Mac will be happy to do so but for PHP, the most popular open source programming language, you have to edit some hidden system file turn on PHP and to allow your Mac to use all the features of the other languages. Even then, you are not running the latest versions and are not going to have a rich compliment of additional libraries.

There are people who are happy to help you with this state of affairs. Marc Liyange has made upgrade packages available that will get you up and running with the default Apache installation. This is an excellent resource.

That’s not your easiest choice, however. MAMP (The abbreviation MAMP stands for: Macintosh, Apache, Mysql and PHP) offers a full featured Apache server package that installs with just a few mouse clicks. From the website:

MAMP is installed in the typical Mac fashion: very easily. MAMP will not compromise any existing Apache installation already running with your OS X. You can install Apache, PHP and MySQL without starting a script or having to change any configuration files!

What’s more, if MAMP is no longer needed, it is sufficient to delete the MAMP folder and everything returns to its original status (i.e. MAMP does not modify any of the “normal” OS X).

MAMP keeps pretty up-to-date with Apache, MySQL and PHP. So your are able to test the latest programs, much more so than you can with Apple’s Apache.

A nice feature of MAMP is that it is self-contained and lives in your Applications folder. That means that you can have both it and the Apple version on the same computer, if you want to push the cutting edge and still have a stable production server.

If you want to test, customize and learn about PHP web programs, MAMP is an excellent way to deploy them. It even has a Widget to turn Apache and MySQL on and off.

Publisher: webEdition Software GmbH

Free

In this era of mega-apps that do everything, skEdit just does web text. It has syntax highlighting, but only for web languages HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Asp, Perl, Python, PHP and ColdFusion. See where I’m going with this? Most programming editors try to cover everything. That’s great if you program in a dozen languages and eat C++ with your Wheaties. I don’t. I do web sites. I use HTML and CSS every day. I use JavaScript and PHP a couple of times a week. Except for a little SQL, that’s the extent of my programming. If you jive on Java, go elsewhere. I’ll stay here with skEdit.

It is nice to have a program that’s focused on one area and performs its job well. skEdit does and at a remarkably low price. I learned web design with BBEdit. I stayed with it for several upgrades, shelling out my $50 each time. skEdit costs $25. Period. Upgrades are free. And upgrades come with reasonable frequency. This is not a throw away piece of shareware, but one that it lovingly crafted by an involved developer. When BBEdit came out with version 8, I oohed and ahhed at the nifty new features, tried the demo and decided not to plunk down another installment payment on my web editing. Don’t get me wrong. BBEdit is a fine program. But then so is skEdit and I had grown used to its way of doing things and found it good.

skEdit has a long list of features, most of which I actually use, unlike those of some other programs. I love the code completion and the tabbed windows. skEdit lets me save projects and will open all the files in a project (Site) in a side panel. It works sort of like Dreamweaver’s site view. I wish I could access my sites with a drop down menu but opening the Site list box is easy enough.

There’s built in S/FTP capability, actually a built in client, Fugu. It’s not the most full featured FTP program around and it’s not as easy to use as the Open from FTP, that’s built into BBEdit, but it gets the job done.

What I really love is the Snippets function. With a bit of work you can craft your own code snippets and assign keyboard shortcuts for them. The ability to do most of my work, including bracketed tag insert, from the keyboard is a real time saver and one of the criteria I use to catagorize a program as for a pro or amateur end user. skEdit is definitely a pro program and has an excellent workflow.

Besides those little special treats, there’s the standard list of pro coding essentials including multiple file search and replace with regular expressions. skEdit has block indenting, auto-tabbing, bracket highlighting, auto-completion, WebKit and browser preview, multiple charachter encodings and character entities. If you structure your documents well, skEdit will allow you to jump through the DOM, going to specific named elements or H tags. It has HTML Tidy built in, too. There is now Subversion support, through a plugin, though I haven’t tried it yet.

The only thing that I really miss is support for John Gruber’s brilliant Markdown HTML conversion tool. While I don’t use Markdown when I design pages, I do use it for most of my pre-post blog editing.

skEdit v3.6
For Mac OS X versions 10.3 and later
$24.95

Developer’s site: http://www.skti.org/

Features: 4+
Ease of Use: 5
Value for Money: 5
Documentation: 4+
Macness: 5

Highly recommended

The Ruby on Rails web application framework has built up a tremendous head of steam over the last year. Fueled by some significant benefits and an impressive portfolio of real-world applications already in production, Rails is destined to continue making significant inroads in 2006. Simply put, Ruby on Rails is an open source tool that gives you the advantage of rapidly creating great web applications backed by SQL databases to keep up with the speed of the web. And with the release of Rails 1.0 kicking off the new year, there’s never been a better time to climb aboard.

It should come as no surprise that Mac OS X is a favored platform for Rails development. Rails and its supporting cast of web servers and databases thrive on the rich Mac OS X environment. The premier text editor favored by legions of Rails programmers everywhere is TextMate, a Cocoa application. And all members of the Rails core development team work with Macs.

This article introduces you to Ruby on Rails by building a trivial web application step by step. Consider it a ride on the express train–an overview of what Rails can do, including a look at features new to Rails 1.0. In the end you’ll be better equipped to consider the advantages of powering your web application with Rails.