Panther and Tiger Benchmarks
…wherein John benchmarks Panther and Tiger on a PowerBook G4 using Xbench. Hilarity ensues.
Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger Benchmarks
…wherein John benchmarks Jaguar, Panther, and Tiger on a Power Mac G5 using Xbench.
SubEthaEdit 2.0.1
Have you ever wished you could work on a document with someone else at the same time? Do you think it would be better if you could not only do this easily on a local network, but over the internet as well? Then SubEthaEdit, by The Coding Monkeys is probably for you.
SubEthaEdit 2.0’s icon
SubEthaEdit is a redezvous enabled text editor. In a nutshell, it allows multiple people to view and edit a single document at the same time. How is this useful? Think of collaborative development projects, or of collaborative writing projects, or of any other project that could benefit from more than one person working on it at the same time.
Fourty-two Heads Are Better Than One
Programmed with emphasis on speed and effeciency, SubEthaEdit was a big hit when it originally debuted as Hydra. Being one of the first programs to utilize Rendezvous, it won the 2003 Apple Design Award for Best Student Product and O’Reilly’s 2003 Mac OS X Innovators Award.
Legal issues forced the name change from Hydra to SubEthaEdit (an homage to Douglas Adams) and Apple’s WebKit capability was added fairly early on. The essential features of SubEthaEdit have remained the same since version one: It’s a lean, mean text editing machine.
Features, Features, Features
SubEthaEdit may be lightweight in size, but it is a heavyweight when it comes features and speed. Version 2.0 has been completely re-written, adding many new features in the process. One of the key features is ability to have other users on your network (with Rendezvous) or remotely (over the internet) join in and work together simultaneously on a document. Seeing each other’s changes in real time and the ability to invite people to your documents by simply dragging their name from the Rendezvous or Internet windows to your document make collaboration simple and effective.
Sharing is done now with the newer “SEE” protocol which is 300% more effecient then the previous “Hydra” protocol. With the new protocol, it is even easier to get someone to join a document using custom URLs which look like this: see://hostname:port/document name. With greater integration with iChat and Mail to share documents more easily, split view and per mode preferences, version 2 allows people to work together more effectively.
SubEthaEdit includes a powerful extendable feature called modes. Modes let SubEthaEdit know what syntax you are coding in. If you choose HTML for example, then tags are highlighted accordingly. What’s new is that modes are now self contained, meaning new ones can easily be installed as they become available.
In order to make SubEthaEdit more versatile for diverse users, The Coding Monkeys have included full support for Unicode and Cocoa Services allowing you to expand what SubEthaEdit can do with such services as AntiWordService(allow the opening of Microsoft Word documents in any Cocoa application) or CalcService. Coupled with the ability to split the view in a single window and see multiple views on different parts of a document in different windows, SubEthaEdit has made it easy to enhance and see multiple parts of your document.
Also featured is SubEthaEdit’s support for Apple’s WebKit to display HTML pages as they are being created. New in version 2.0, you now have better control over the display, by being able to choose a refresh rate for the "delayed" preview, meaning that SubEthaEdit will update the Web Preview after approximately 1.5 seconds of inactivity.
Geeky Enhancements
Under the hood, SubEthaEdit has undergone a substantial change to make life for power users and developers easier.
Regular Expressions, abbreviated regexp or regex, are strings (in this case lines of text) that describe whole set of strings according to syntax rules. This adds the power to search your documents for, and replace, entire strings quickly and easily.
SubEthaEdit now supports the POSIX, POSIX extended, Emacs, grep, GNU, Java, Perl and Ruby flavours of regular expressions making it easy for any regular expression regular to use the regex mark-up flavour they are used to.
The new network protocol used by SubEthaEdit is based on the "Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol" otherwise known as "BEEP"or "bxxp", an open standard known for "connection-oriented, asynchronous request/response interactions based Internet applications".
With line ending conversion (a feature I personally like very much) I can now switch between the way lines are ended, thus being able to avoid weird characters showing up at the end of lines, which occasionally happens using other editors on other operating systems.
Lastly, blockediting, a more advanced but vastly useful feature, allows a user to change multiple lines of text at the exact same spot. The Coding Monkeys have an excellent video demonstrating blockediting on SubEthaEdit’s FAQ page.
Conclusions
SubEthaEdit in it’s entirety is extremely versatile, well written and exceptionally useful. Group collaboration may only be fully grasped when seen in person, just like wireless internet; it will change the way you work (or at least want to).
It’s not perfect for every situation, I am not sure I’d want to write a thesis using a straight text editor, but for programming in any language or writing anything collaborative it’s hard to beat SubEthaEdit. The biggest complaint I have is that in group collaboration when someone is working “above” you in a document, as they add or delete lines, it causes what you are working on to shift in your window. Also, some features that worked in version 1.x no longer work in 2.0, such as the cocoa word completion list key-command, option-escape.
As text editors go, SubEthaEdit is certainly a workhorse. It includes many features that the average user would want and many more that the average programmer needs, and at the same time it is not bloated. SubEthaEdit gets a 9 out of 10.
Links & Info
Free for Personal Use, $35US for a Corporate License
Requires OS X 10.3 or later
4 MB Hard Drive Space
SubEthaEdit Homepage
The Coding Monkeys
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