Here’s a very cool little open source module for Cocoa application developers: Sparkle by Andy Matuschak. It allows applications to detect, download, and install new versions automatically. It apparently can be added to a project without any glue code at all. It supports Appcast feeds. It’s got handy features like Skip This Version and Remind Me Later. It can work with .dmg files or .zip archives.
During my brief stint with Cocoa programming I really wanted something like this.
Extending my Reverse game coding spree, I decided to make a version in Logo. Of course, in order to really effectively program in Logo, I had to make a TextMate bundle for it.
It’s nice when minor obsessions come together like that.
(By the way, if you’re ever in a position where you’re trying to look up information on Logo on the web, be warned that it can be damned hard thanks to the conscientiously inserted alt text on five bazillion company logos!
On the heels of yesterday’s lovely site redesign, Allan Odgaard has released TextMate 1.5. If you’ve been downloading the “cutting edge” builds you’ve probably already got it. It has come a long way since the last official release (1.02). And on top of all the improvements to the program, there’s now a manual.
For more on why I think TextMate is so cool, see my earlier post/review.
TextMate author Allan Odgaard has been working on a user manual for the program, in preparation for next week’s final release of version 1.1. He’s been writing and editing for a few weeks. As a Markdown devotee (all my posts here are written using Markdown) I was pleased to see this comment in his blog entry about the manual:
Should you somehow have missed my countless references to Markdown then for the records let me just state that the documentation was written in Markdown and I absolutely love it!
I added Wilson Miner’s TextMate bundle for Django templates to the TextMate bundle repository today. Thanks, Wilson!
comments commented on Sun Jan 15 11:46:27 2006:
the ‘scope’ selectors need to be changed. As is the scope text.html.django doesn’t work. text.html works fine.
Paul commented on Sun Jan 15 13:44:40 2006:
But then you get Django-style coloring in all your HTML files. It works as-is. You do have to specifically select the “language” from the language selector at the bottom of the window.
I banged my head against this one for a while before figuring it out, so I’m posting the solution – for my own future reference if nothing else.
I’ve been working on extending Textmate’s Markdown language bundle. The development versions of the bundles are stored in a repository managed by Subversion.
I noticed that the bundle’s name started with a lowercase letter, unlike the other bundles, so I did a quick svn mv to fix it:
Warning: this is a long post about… a text editor.
I’m very late to the TextMate party. Like many other people, I heard the buzz when it came out last fall, checked it out, and went away interested but unimpressed.
At the time I knew that BBEdit’s long stint as my primary text editor was coming to a close. For its replacement I wanted an app that felt cleaner; was Cocoa, not Carbon; didn’t have a dozen years of accumulated cruft in the menus; and didn’t have language-specific features that felt tacked-on.