As some of you may have heard, I am now officially a US citizen — an endeavor that has taken almost eight years and several thousand dollars to complete, despite the fact that my wife was born and raised in the US of A, and that I have lived here for over 12 years.

One of the platforms that both parties are debating on this election year is whether or not to give amnesty to illegal immigrants (and perhaps amnesty is not the right word since these people have not been officially convicted of any crime). Point being…Democrats want to pursue some kind of “pardon” for all illegal immigrants, while Republicans want them to “wait in line like everybody else.” Well, having immigrated to this country myself, I have some opinions on the matter which may or may not interest you.
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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.

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!!!!!

You might have better luck solving the chicken and the egg question compared to determining which of these is the better editor. I truly think there is no perfect answer for anyone out there, but I can tell you that there are certain things about each one of these editors that I love — and things that I loathe.

I could write a long-winded review of each editor but there are many such posts on the web already — instead, I will just give you a quick bulleted list of things I like and dislike.

Right off the bat, I have to say that I have used both BBEdit and TextMate extensively in the past whereas my experience with Coda has been very limited. The primary languages I develop in are HTML, CSS, XML, and Actionscript. I also do a little PHP and Javascript, but not enough to really make a difference.
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I have long wondered about the appeal of having song clips as your phone ringtone. Quite frankly, I just don’t get it. Much like I didn’t get the time I went to a club and people were trying to dance to a Nine Inch Nails song.

Don’t get me wrong. Being able to change the ringtone on your phone is definitely worthwhile if you’re changing it to a louder tone, or a more effective ringing pattern — it’s just the song thing I don’t get. I am baffled that the ringtone industry is as big as it is! Do people really change their ringtones that often?

Hmm…maybe I’m getting old. Although I did hear one particular ringtone that I quite enjoyed — it was the theme song for Super Mario Bros! Now who doesn’t love that?!

[UPDATE]: Heh. Apparently I wasn’t the only one thinking about ringtones lately.