OSNews

The most powerful text / scripting / HTML editor for BeOS is Maarten Hekkelman's Pe. I lived in Pe for years. I maintained three web sites, did all my shell scripting, and wrote two books and countless articles in Pe. Hekkelman has ported Pe to OS X under the name Pepper, so this transition could have been super easy for me. But for the sake of change, and because I wanted to see why BBEdit has the reputation it does, I adopted BBEdit for my power editing needs under OS X. That was a tough one for me, since I feel a certain loyalty to Maarten, and because it would be like a sentimental tie to my past. What finally swayed me was the fact that I wanted access to the huge community of BBEdit code wizards out there through the BareBones mailing lists.

Because BBEdit has been around longer, and because it comes from a team of programmers rather than an individual, BBEdit wins, feature-for-feature. But in practice, and for the kind of work I do, BBEdit hasn't offered any real-world advantages over Pe. They're equally elegant and powerful (roughly speaking), and the differences in the big picture are fairly minor. So this one is a draw.

Point: love-love.

For those wanting to run *nix applications both BeOS and OS X have the ability to run an X server and client, and to run X applications. In OS X, X can run either "rooted" or "rootless." In rootless mode, the X system does not take over the entire desktop, so one can run *nix GUI apps side by side with Carbon/Cocoa apps. In BeOS, X runs in a large window, so the experience is fairly similar. However, the XonX project has more developers and more momentum. Compatibility is greater, and we can expect to see the experience continue to improve with time. Whether or not BeOS' X implementation gets any better (it was fairly shaky last time I tried it) is anybody's guess.

In any case, I haven't found much reason to run XonX, as the only reasons I might want to are to compensate for missing application categories, and so far I haven't found an app category not filled either by Carbon/Cocoa apps or by Classic mode. I'm happy to let XonX remain the domain of people who keep one foot planted firmly in the *nix world.

Point goes to OS X.

One downside I didn't expect about OS X software is that it gets expensive fast. I don't come from the camp that believes software must be free, and I love to support developers who do good work. It makes me happy. But like anyone, I enjoy having access to free software as well, and there's very little in the way of freeware available for OS X. Freeware just isn't a part of the OS X culture, and shareware apps cost about 50% more on average than equivalent BeOS shareware apps. By the time you add up everything you pay to populate your machine with all the app launchers, text editors, image viewers, and other doo-dads you need to get through the day, it's easy to add a hefty sum to the initial price of purchase. Hey, it's a free market, and I respect it. But migrating users should be prepared.

Fortunately, the quality of the software I've been digging up has been extremely high in general - independent Mac OS developers really seem to put a lot of care into their craft. In a way, software for Mac OS is kind of like Apple hardware - you pay more, but you also get more.

1. "Out of the Frying Pan..."
2. "... And Into the Fire..."
3. "Smells Like Home Cookin"
4. "A Lot To Like, First Impressions"
5. "Networking Nirvana"
6. "CD Burning, Disk Images"
7. "Applications"
8. "iMovie, iDVD"
9. "Browsers and E-Mail"
10. "Power Editors"
11. "Community"
12. "The Bad and The Ugly"
13. "File System Shoot-Out"
14. "Application-Binding Policies"
15. "Alien Filesystems"
16. "Miscellaneous Moans and Groans"
17. "All Told, Life Is Good"