As I wrote previously, I'm using a MacBook now for almost all my daily work. On that post I got some comments about the quality and general availability of software on the platform, so I thought I'd take stock after using it for a while and see what applications I use and where I haven't found good solutions yet.

Writing, authoring, note taking and similar

Microsoft Office for the Mac is the same enormous package on the Mac that it is on Windows. Well, perhaps not quite as large overall. Some minor issues I've found include that Word templates don't look 100% the same on both platforms - generally quite good software, and essential to me for full compatibility. Includes the slightly weird Entourage, which is not quite Outlook, but comes with a lot of Mac goodness, like Automator integration.

OpenOffice.org (isn't that one of the stupidest product names ever?) isn't quite as great on the Mac as it is on other platforms... only the newest pre-release versions have a native Mac UI available, while older builds use the X11 compatibility layer. While I appreciate the availability of X11 on the Mac to be able to run the occasional Unix tool more easily, it's not a very nice environment in many ways... or at least it would require much more work to configure right. Anyway, I'm just installing OpenOffice to have an alternative to MS Office when I need one, so it doesn't really have to look great. Otherwise, there's

NeoOffice - might be worth a look if OpenOffice just looks too ugly. Allegedly also faster with certain things. I haven't really tried it myself.

iWork is Apple's own take on a productivity suite - in addition to the considerable capabilities the OS X platform offers out of the box of course. I got it for free with my Mac, and while I won't pretend I've spent ages with it, I must say it's a very useful package. Keynote alone is worth more than the entire package, compatible with PowerPoint and the presentations can easily look nicer...

OmniGraffle is the answer to one problem I could never solve satisfactorily on Windows. Its functionality is somewhere between Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, PowerPoint, and a whole bunch of other applications whose functionality evolves around the creation of drawings, diagrams and so on. I'm not an artist, and OmniGraffle hits just the right spot between providing things out of the box and in-depth functionality that I can use when things need a bit of tweaking. I'll review OmniGraffle in some more detail in the future.

Curio was the result of a long search for a note taking application that would replace OneNote for me. So does it do everything like OneNote does? No, it doesn't... there's pros and cons to Curio. The overall functionality is easily much more sophisticated than OneNote's, but some usability details could be improved. Another subject for review later on. It's my preference over several other loosely related apps I tried to various extents, including VoodooPad Pro, OmniOutliner Pro, NoteTaker, Notebook, Evernote and DEVONthink.

MindManager has always been one of my favorite pieces of software (a mind mapping tool, of course), and while the Mac version lacks many features compared with the Windows one, it still blows any competition clean out of the water. Also tried Consideo, though not in very much depth.

Capturing the screen on the Mac is surprisingly complicated. Yes, there's a tool for screenshots included and it works just fine. But I'm used to what SnagIt and Camtasia were offering on Windows and there aren't many tools around that even come close. I tried FlySketch for screen shooting, and Snapz Pro X and iShowU for recording - iShowU was actually not bad, but the rest... well. An oddity from my point of view is that apps on the Mac tend to use weird .mov files for videos - yeah, that's .mov, the file type I'm used to ignoring because it brings up the Apple video player that blocks every Windows machine for minutes, comes with restricted functionality and wants updating every few days. Of course I know things are different on the Mac and .mov files actually play nicely, but still - what's wrong with a nice compatible .mpg file? Most interestingly, a solution to the screen shooting/recording problem might come from TechSmith - Camtasia and/or SnagIt for the Mac. Hopefully soon.

TextMate is of course the well-known text editor for Mac OS X. Really extremely nice. Bundles for many different file types/development environments, supporting a number of languages for automation, including Ruby and shell scripts. Nice templating as well. I haven't put it through the paces of my personal editor acceptance tests yet, but I know I do like it so far.

Aquamacs is a port of Emacs for the Mac. A very good port indeed, better than the ones I used to use on Windows. I'm torn between this one and TextMate - they are too different in too many ways to really make a decision. Good thing I can just install both.

MacTeX. Who can be without TeX? Ah... sadly, many people these days manage, or think they do. Anyway. MacTeX is a very nice and complete package.

I'm currently missing an application that is an image editor. I'm not talking about stuff that Lightroom can do (or Photoshop of course) to my photos - I'm talking about editing images, like I sometimes do for icons, web graphics, ... it's weird to feel the need to explain this - ten years or so ago, everybody knew exactly what "picture editing" meant. I used to use PaintShop Pro on Windows, which did the job nicely, although the functionality added in the past few years goes more in the direction of photo management as well. Anyway, funnily enough I haven't found any nice application for this purpose on the Mac yet.

PIM

iCal and Address Book are of course standard utilities on the Mac, but they are good. I'm not missing anything from Outlook.

OmniFocus is a great todo list application (well, that doesn't really do it justice...) based on GTD philosophy, but flexible enough to allow any style of todo handling (important, since I don't really do GTD). Another app to say more about in the future. I tried this against several others, including Anxiety, iGTD and Things.

Internet

ecto is the blogging tool I'm currently using. I have an ugly problem with it related to white space handling - basically ecto drops whitespace in certain circumstances. Hm. Had a quick look at MarsEdit as an alternative, but since I've finally received a reply from ecto support, I'll wait a bit and see. MarsEdit doesn't have a rich text editor, which sort of turns me off... I could just as well use TextMate then, couldn't I?

Skype, of course, works just as well on the Mac as it does on Windows. I believe the versions aren't up to the same standard regarding newest features, but then I stopped using newest features in Skype for Windows years ago, so I'm not bothered.

Adium is a multi-protocol IM client and it's simply fantastic. I've tried enough different clients on Windows in the past and I've used Trillian and Miranda for years - Adium is way better than either of these. Luckily it was the first one I tried on the Mac and it's going to be the last.

I use the boring standard Apple Mail application that comes with OS X for my email needs. It works very nicely with my IMAP server and (of course) it doesn't have any usability oddities, which are the rule rather than the exception in Thunderbird on the Mac. I gave two add-ins for Mail a try, Mail Act-On and MailTags, but I decided I could live without them. One of them, don't know which, also gave me some stability problems with Mail.

Twhirl is the Twitter client I use - I like it, but I believe there are many out there that have the same functionality.

CocoaWget is a graphical frontend for the GNU tool wget. Like a download manager. I rarely need that functionality - I'm sure there are more full-featured (at least in the graphical UI department) download managers out there.

Cyberduck is a tool for FTP and a few similar file transfer protocols. Nice, with bookmarks, resume support, SCP and SFTP support and AppleScript integration.

I'm using Thunderbird as an NNTP news reader. I tried Unison, but stayed with Thunderbird. Sadly, NNTP is another thing I'm doing less and less these days. Stupid web forums.

NetNewsWire is my RSS client, through NewsGator. Great. Wouldn't use anything else.

Firefox, still the browser of choice. I tried Safari with a few plugins (Inquisitor, Saft, SafariStand), but it didn't really come close in terms of comfort. They should add a proper plugin architecture into Safari, perhaps some of the issues would then solve themselves. In Firefox, I'm not a heavy plugin user - these are the ones I use: Adblock Plus, Colorful Tabs, Delicious Bookmarks and Firebug.

Tools

1Password is a password manager, the best one I've ever seen. Having used Password Safe on Windows for years, I tried Password Safe SWT on the Mac, which is compatible with the Windows app, but sadly a pain in the neck to use. Password Gorilla was another app I tried before I decided to drop the compatibility thing. 1Password imported my 600+ password file and it can create encrypted HTML files for easy use of (searchable!) password lists on any platform. Lots of other nice features.

The search for a file manager was difficult and it's not over yet. On Windows I used Altap Salamander, which was great - with the exception of its lack of Unicode support. Currently I use muCommander on the Mac, as the best dual-pane solution I could find. It crashes on me regularly when working with network shares, and it lacks some important features like connecting to shares easily or configuring the editor to use for the F4 command. Weird. Before I got there, I tried lots of others, including ones that weren't dual pane, but most were either extremely simplistic in their feature set or buggy or incomplete with no support. These are the ones I tried: ForkLift (hard to use with the keyboard, simple features like filtering for the lists missing), XFile (weird package of tools, no context menu support, just one pane, weird keyboard configuration), RAGE Macintosh Explorer (tabbed, not dual-pane, really mouse-only), Path Finder (quite nice though not dual-pane - ran out of trial time before I could get a second look), Xfolders (not bad, but extremely simple), FlyPath (basic NeXT file manager, similar to what Finder can do these days), FileBrowse (useless), 3DOSX (weird 3d crap), Liquifile (very weird) and Disk Order (quite nice, though only slightly more capable than Xfolder, sent support emails about certain important issues, never got replies).

QuickSilver is of course the mother of all launchers, the one that everybody else tries to clone. It's really very impressive, loads of special packages, very intelligent handling of all kinds of data. Hard to describe ;-) Anyway, I've found a few really simple things so hard to do that I still haven't figured them out - like how to add a shortcut myself that gets me to a particular URL, for instance. Well. I'm sure I'm missing something, and I haven't spent too much time looking so far. Launchbar, btw, is one other that I had a quick look at.

Toast is my burning application of choice, although I haven't even looked at it in much detail yet. All others I found were very basic. There's lots of functionality around even in standard OS X, although it's spread across lots of different apps. But I wanted everything that Nero could do and Toast gives me that - in a nicer package than Nero, it has to be said. More about Toast when I've had time for a closer look. Others I tried (and some of them looked okay for basic stuff like dealing with images) include these: LiquidCD, Disco, Burn

I use iTunes on the Mac to work with my iPod. On Windows I'd totally given up on that (I was using Anapod) because the app was unusable - but the difference is similar to that regarding mov files (see above). iTunes still has quite a hard time with my MP3 collection on a network share, but at least it stays usable.

Araxis Merge deserves a mention because it's a fantastic file diff/merging tool for both Windows and Mac. But I'm in fact not using it, because their pricing is just ridiculous. Haven't found a suitable alternative on the Mac yet - of course Unix tools and Emacs diff/merge are much more usable than they are on Windows...

Canoscan Toolbox - weird entry, yes, but this is the driver for my CanoScan 8400F scanner and it's a really very nice piece of software. I recommend Canon scanners purely for the reason that they come with no-nonsense software that doesn't look like a candy machine, and it even works on the Mac. Great.

I am not currently using a clipboard monitor tool, which is very unfortunate... I've worked with ClipMate on Windows for many years, and while that one was maybe a little antiquated in some ways, it worked well and was continuously maintained. I didn't actually use that many of its functions - just the clipboard history really, and a few simple things like concatenating clips and pasting without formatting. Well, on the Mac I tried every tool I could find, including iClipboard, CopyPaste Pro, iClip and CuteClips, and they were all crap, pretty much. Some of them at least looked pretty, but none were properly usable with the keyboard or had a history that did the job. I hope somebody is going to create something soon... maybe it's time I had another look around and chose something to live with, rather than not having one.

For backup purposes I use both Time Machine and SuperDuper!. Time Machine does regular backups and provides a history of file changes - great. I have an external 1TB drive attached for that, which is about half full so far. SuperDuper! is a tool that creates a full clone of a hard drive. I used to use Acronis True Image irregularly on Windows, and it had some features that SuperDuper! doesn't have. But in turn SuperDuper! is really not intrusive at all. With True Image I always had the problem that when it ran over night and I got back to the machine the next day, all my memory was paged out and it took an hour or two before the machine started behaving normally again. No such thing with SuperDuper!, and so I have my drive cloned onto another, portable external drive every night. Have I mentioned that the clone is directly bootable via USB?

I've been trying Versions for SVN, and also ZigVersion, but I'm now using the command line tools mostly. Both of these apps were quite nice - Versions kept running out of time in the current pre-release version - although they had a few nasty habits, like scanning the whole local repository all the time. I might have another look, but I do like command line tools, and on the Mac working on the command line finally feels quite natural and efficient again.

I was looking for a picture viewer with slide show functionality. I'd always used IrfanView on Windows. The first thing that was really odd was that neither of the tools I tried first was able to work with a directory of stuff easily - point it at one picture from the "trip to TechEd" folder and be able to navigate through all the other pictures in that same folder. Weird. Isn't that a very normal thing to do? Ah well... the one I'm using now is called Xee and can do this easily enough, as well as everything else I need (which isn't really much). I also tried ViewIt and Shomi.

Adobe Lightroom is at least as nice on the Mac as it is on Windows (it's an app that works with your camera, archives your images, has post-processing functionality, ...). I actually got the impression that it dealt a bit better with my picture archive on a network share than it did on Windows. If you own a license for one of the platforms, the other is also included. Good job, Adobe!

VMWare Fusion is the Mac edition of the virtualization software I've been using for around ten years. The current beta 2.0 releases are very stable and offer almost everything the Windows versions have, too. In fact, until the recent 6.5 release on Windows, the Mac version was the only one to have Unity, the feature that allows you to have application windows for apps running in the VM hanging around on the desktop together with those from apps running on the host. I never tried Parallels because VMWare was a natural choice for me, but I hear its performance is nowhere near as good, even more so on Macs with multiple processors.

Microsoft has Remote Desktop Connection for the Mac, which is great because I use it to access and maintain two of my servers. Thumbs up, Microsoft!

Google Earth (as well as some other Google stuff on that same page) is available for the Mac, and it's just as good as the Windows version.

Handbrake is a nice tool to down-convert DVD movies into MPEG 4. Nice if you want to watch movies on small devices. Works on Windows, too!

Witch is an enhancement to the task switching functionality in OS X. Normally you can switch applications (Cmd-Tab) or windows in the current app (Cmd-`), but with Witch you can switch to a particular application window directly. Nice.

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Right, that's it for now. Hope it's interesting - otherwise it'll just serve as a note-to-self :-)

This is fantastic – an IDE for PowerShell (used to be Monad). Get it here, it’s free!

I just thought it might be a good idea to write a post for my text editor category again - the problem is, I don't currently have the time to do more tests. I haven't lost interest in this, so rest assured there will be more tests as soon as my time allows it!

Here we go with another editor test, this time I took a look at EditPlus. You can find the introductional posting to this series here.

EditPlus is a commercial product by ES-Computing and it's available from www.editplus.com. The version I tested was v2.12 (76).

First impressions

This program manages to show me two separate warnings on first startup, about the fact that I'm not a licensed user of the program. Why can't they just let me get started with my 30 days evaluation without bothering me with this from the word go?

EditPlus installed a few start menu shortcuts and opened the link window after the installation was complete. That's what made me click on their readme file, which I probably wouldn't have seen otherwise. The interesting thing is that the readme has an English part and a part in "Hangul (Korean)", a language I'm not familiar with. What surprised me, though, was that the Korean part displayed only cryptic ASCII rubbish instead of nice Korean characters. By going to a link that was listed in that paragraph (http://www.editplus.com/kr) I was able to confirm that my system has everything installed that's necessary to view this language correctly. So, the first impression is that EditPlus doesn't appear to have any Unicode support - or can it be that the makers forgot about that when writing up their readme?

The last thing I noticed immediately is an aesthetic aspect: I recently changed my Windows XP theme to the (more or less) new Royale theme by Microsoft. This seems to be a problem for the menu system in EditPlus, because every single entry in the menu bar has a background that's noticeably lighter than the surrounding colour. I double-checked the same thing with the two editors I previously tested (UltraEdit and TextPad) and I found that both of them have the same problem! Interesting...

General features

EditPlus starts up very fast. The document model is MDI with an additional button bar at the bottom of the window, that allows to switch directly between loaded files.

While looking at regular expressions support, I found an interesting bug: I have a file starting with a line that says "Oliver Sturm". Now I was searching for ([^\s]+) and the first match I got was Oliver Sturm (note that the space between the words was included). Searching for the next match, I got this: Oliver Sturm. It was not possible at all to match the complete line with the complete test expression ([^\s]+) ([^\s]+).
I sent this information to support and got a quick answer: EditPlus doesn't support the \s placeholder. I looked at the documentation (hm - could have done that earlier :-)) and found that there's no support at all for this kind of placeholder, neither for \s nor for \w, \d and the many others that are common. While TextPad (see previous test) at least offered supported for the Posix placeholder syntax, which is less comfortable to use but just as effective, EditPlus just doesn't have any of those.

To cut the story short, I got a part success when I tried replacing the expression ([^ ]+) ([^ ]+) by \2 \1. This worked, but only after I switched off case sensitivity in the Find/Replace function. Apparently this is a bug, I'll update this post with information when I get it from EditPlus support.

Multi file searching is supported, but replacing is not.

Word wrapping can be switched on and off easily, via a standard toolbar button or a keyboard combination. It's also possible to configure toolbars to include any of the standard menu entries. It's not possible to create new user toolbars, nor can additional commands, like commands to toggle a specific option, be used.

Scrolling and redrawing is normally extremely fast. The only thing that drags this down a bit is if word wrapping is on for a really large file - in this case, a status bar appears in the lower left corner of the window, showing how EditPlus is recalculating the wrapping of those lines that are too long. This happens for example when resizing the window, all the time, that is, which can be a bit disturbing. Interesting enough: with a very "wide" file, one line with around four million columns, scrolling and redrawing is just fine, even if word wrapping is on.

Memory allocation in EditPlus is a funny thing. I have this XML file in two versions, one with line feeds and indentation, nicely readable, the other with all the XML on one line. The readable file is slightly larger at 3.8MB, compared to 3.6MB for the compact one. Now, when loading the compact file into memory, Process Explorer shows the working set of the process growing by about 4MB. A nice number, without too much additional overhead. But when I load the nice version of the file, I see that this takes me about 15MB of memory! Huh?

Well, part of this is overhead that has to do with word wrapping, believe it or not. Word wrapping is on by default when loading this file, and switching it on and off lets the working set value shoot up and down by 4MB. 4MB RAM for word wrapping? Wow. A quick calculation: the file has about 132500 lines, 3850 of which are wrapped when word wrapping is on. I assume that for a line that's not wrapped, only that information has to be stored: not wrapped. That's a byte, or hell, let's say four bytes. So roughly half an MB is gone on that. Which makes it 3.5MB for the wrapped 3850 lines, which is 909 bytes per line. Whoa.

Obviously, this doesn't explain where the additional 7MB of RAM go - and did I mention that RAM usage goes down when switching word wrapping for the one line-file, too? Saves another 400KB or so on that one...

Sadly, EditPlus doesn't seem to have any support for Hex editing.

Big file support is another thing in EditPlus that's not as it should be. My normal test file has around 612MB, which is normally not a problem to load into my 2GB of RAM. When I tried to load this file, I got a message from EditPlus telling me that there was a file size of 511MB.

Things didn't get better from there. I cut the file a bit to get it just under the magic limit of 511MB. Loading it failed nevertheless, with EditPlus crashing after using about 1GB of RAM - at this point, the status bar showed a load progress of 46%. I tried freeing even more RAM and the effect was that it took more than 1.2GB before crashing. EditPlus was the first among the editors I have tested so far that didn't manage to load a large file like this.

EditPlus is easily usable with the keyboard, with the same potential restrictions that the toolbar configurability suffers from. It's possible to configure keyboard shortcuts for every menu command via the Preferences dialog.

The only function that can pass for an editing helper is the Reformat command. This command will recognize the indentation depth of a paragraph of text and reformat it to break at a specific column. In the process, it kills any more fancy formatting there may be :-(

EditPlus supports all three variants of line feeds and allows to switch them for any open file. It's also possible to use a so-called converter when loading or saving a file - these are available for UTF-16 (called Unicode, once again), UTF-8, UTF-7 and a variety of code pages. Not quite complete, but nicely implemented. On the other hand, I was unable to load the aforementioned readme file with any of the Korean converters, so that I could have seen the Korean text in it correctly. It's possible that I'm doing something wrong here, though.

EditPlus settings are another peculiar thing. Directly from the application, it's possible to set the "INI File Directory". There's even an extra menu entry for that, as if I was going to do it all the time. Interestingly, the default path is the EditPlus directory underneath Program Files... what if I hadn't had write permissions there? How about using \Documents and Settings\{username}\Application Data, guys?

The settings themselves seem to be distributed across a few ini files in the configured path and the registry. This is exactly what I meant when I included this point in my requirements list... this is how it should not be done.

System integration

The GUI of EditPlus is moderately modern, but it could definitely benefit from a facelift. The icons look extremely simplistic and some of them are really non-standard (ever seen a green floppy disk icon for the Save button?). In the Preferences dialog there's a mixture of weirdly formatted option pages (see the top line jumping when scrolling up and down the Categories tree) and some antique Delphi-esque (or is that Borlandish?) buttons. Other dialogs, like Find and Replace, are crowded in the usual way and the buttons are all over the place.

EditPlus integrates itself in the Explorer context menu with its own entry, but this can easily be switched off from the Preferences window. It's also possible to associate every file type know to EditPlus with the program, directly from the corresponding configuration panel. Nice.

EditPlus didn't have any problems with my system's ClearType settings and the Consolas font works nicely. It's easy to switch the default font setting in EditPlus and there's even a toolbar button with a popup menu that allows to switch the font quickly, from a customizable list of options.

The file selection dialogs used by EditPlus are the Windows standard ones, with a few extensions. They allow access to files from UNC paths and namespace extensions without problems. The so-called Directory selector, which is an alternative means to load files and browse the file system via a panel on the left hand side of the window, doesn't offer the same level of compatibility, though. It does have support for Network Folders, but that's cumbersome to use and it's not possible to browse other arbitrary parts of the Windows Explorer namespace.

Syntax highlighting

Out of the box, EditPlus supported the following from my list of requested file types: C#, Perl, HTML and XML. The extremely large list of additional "user files" on the EditPlus web site had syntax highlighting definitions for Pascal/Delphi, but once again I wasn't able to find any for diff/patch files or e-mail files.

Extending EditPlus with additional highlighters is easy, and there doesn't seem to be a limit for this. Highlighters can be created in the form of text files and existing configurations can be extended with additional file types.

Extended file type detection mechanisms are not available in EditPlus.

EditPlus supports nine highlighting file types in its standard installation, while offering a few hundred, sometimes accompanied by auto-completion definitions, on the website. Once again, not the comprehensive package I was hoping for.

Extensibility

EditPlus offers a keystroke recording function that can listen to what the user types and repeat this sequence later. It's possible to save the information to external files and by registering a keystroke recording file it's possible to have a lot of these macros on the Tools menu. It's possible to incorporate actions like Finding into the macro, as long as they are invoked via the keyboard.

"Intelligent" tool integration is supported, so tools can be started with a dynamically constructed parameter list, including information about the current file or the selected string. It's also possible to capture tool output and parse it with a regular expression, which could be handy to call compilers directly from the editor. Nothing like this is included in the standard installation, though.

I couldn't find any information about integration of external extensions in EditPlus.

Networking

EditPlus has FTP support, complete with an account manager and a comprehensive set of options. I was able to access a file via standard Windows XP WebDAV support, but FTP is the only thing integrated in EditPlus itself.

Support and community

The one support request I sent was answered quickly. There's a Yahoo! Group as well as a Wiki, both of them apparently user supported. By the looks of the large user files download area, it seems that there's an active user community, although it's not as visible (like in large active forums) as with other products I have tested.

Price

A single user license of EditPlus costs US $30, which seems like a fair price for the tool.

Results in numbers

General features		System integration
Startup	80	Modern application/UI	50
Regex support	50	Explorer context menu	80
Quick access	70	ClearType/Fonts	80
Scrolling/redrawing	80	File access	65
Memory footprint	20	Syntax highlighting
Hex editing	0	File types	50
Large files	0	Extensibility	75
Keyboard support	70	File recognition	0
Text formatting	30	Package completeness	20
File formats	65	Extensibility
Preferences	40	Macros	50
Networking	65	External extensions	0
Support/community	70	Price	70
Sum: 1180		Average: 49

I have now started to make a tabular overview of the tested text editors available. You can find it here and I will keep it updated with new results as I continue to test.