A little bit ago I wrote some quick thoughts on Coda vs. TextMate vs. BBEdit and had all but removed BBEdit from my list of preferred text editors for the Mac. But the good folks at Bare Bones are saying “not so fast buster”! They have just released BBEdit 9.0 and I’m happy to say that it is worth another look!

With this new version, BBEdit has re-joined the party (at least in my book) with a whole boatload of great features — the first of which you will notice will be a big overhaul of their UI (thank you). And speaking of overhauls, they’ve also re-done their site — which has been long overdue in my opinion. But that’s not all folks! Here are three features that I’m most excited about:

• Projects: view all files in a project on the same window (finally)
• Search/Replace: Not only have they improved the look of this essential feature, they have also added the ability to edit right on the results - a feature that has been requested for years.
• Code Completion: One of my favorite things about both Coda and TextMate is code completion. Anything to save time on repetitive tasks! BBEdit’s implementation is nice and robust – and good lookin’ too

And that’s just the beginning! Bare Bones must’ve realized that they were falling way behind on nice-to-have features and they have come back into the fight swingin’ like mad. However, with all the niceties of the shiny new v9, they still have some skeletons in the closet — the preference pane. Somebody please do something about this! Price could use a little help too.

As I venture into the depths of AS3 – I find myself pulling my hair out yet again (and those of you who know me know I have no hair left, so that’s not a good thing). Loading multiple images in Flash is (in my opinion) one of the most basic tasks you should be able to perform – and yet I have struggled with this for the past several hours in AS3. This will be basic knowledge to many of you, but bare with me.
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I cannot begin to tell you how painfully true this is. The other thing I get a lot of is “Oooh! I have this idea for a cool website! Can you do it?.”

The answer is always no.

After doing a great deal of research on Apple Aperture vs. Adobe Lightroom, I finally landed on Apple’s Aperture. Not so much because the feature set was amazing, but because I had already bought Aperture v1 a while back and figured the upgrade would be cheaper.

Now, there are countless reviews of both products that are fantastic for anyone trying to decide, but I can tell you that after using both products, I can say that both of them are freakin’ awesome, and you simply can’t go wrong with either one. It really boils down to a matter of preference (and computing power actually — as Aperture practically demands an Intel Mac Pro).

Anywho, I won’t get into that right now. My focus at the moment is on Aperture’s export to gallery feature (which I use constantly). I simply love the simplicity of exporting an Aperture gallery. It’s an elegant way of presenting your work to the world, and you can even password-protect your galleries so you can publish an entire photo shoot for your client — and your client only. Very cool.

But there is one MAJOR flaw with Aperture’s gallery feature which confuses me to no end. And that’s the fact that there is no way to publish the photo’s caption – only the photo’s file name. Perhaps there is good logic behind this for professional photographers (even though I fail to see it) – but the fact that you can publish captions to the same gallery using iPhoto and not Aperture completely blows my mind.

Of course, the simple solution is to drag my photos over to iPhoto, and publish from there…but that is not the point here. The point is that the feature already exists — and porting it to Aperture would take Apple’s engineers a whopping two minutes (by my very scientific and precise calculations).

So there you have it. Aperture rocks — but no captions? In the immortal words of Gob…COME ON!!!!!

If you use your Google Calendar on your iPhone or Blackberry, CalDAV support might be of interest to you [update: or not]. You might also consider third-party alternatives (which I have not tried, but hear are very good).

[update: anyone else getting a “calendar not found” error?]

[update: hmm…seems to be back up for me. Google is such a tease.]