By John Gruber
CoverSutra Is Back from the Dead — Your Music Sidekick, Right in the Menu Bar
Bare Bones Software, back on October 15:
BBEdit 13.5 now runs natively on Apple Silicon, and introduces a Markdown Cheat Sheet, internal performance improvements, support for “rescuing” untitled documents, and numerous additions and refinements designed to improve efficiency. In all, version 13.5 includes more than a hundred new features, refinements to existing features, and fixes to reported issues. At present, only the BBEdit 13.5 application available directly from Bare Bones Software is Universal, while all applications in the Mac App Store currently remain Intel-only.
“Over the last 30 years, millions of people have turned to BBEdit to get the job done when the going gets tough,” said Rich Siegel, founder and CEO of Bare Bones Software, Inc. “That’s why we make sure BBEdit is first in place on day one: first on PowerPC, first on Mac OS X, first on Intel, first on the Mac App Store, and now first on Apple silicon. You can use BBEdit to make quick notes, write code, and do all the basics, but you can also use BBEdit to sift, process, and transform multi-gigabyte files, crunch through hundreds of thousands of files, and transform text in a truly dizzying variety of ways.”
If I recall correctly, BBEdit’s initial PowerPC update was a plug-in that ran inside the 68K app, just to speed up text transformations. It would have been surprising if BBEdit had not been first out of the gate to support Apple Silicon.
Here’s a BBEdit story. I was several hundred words into my iPhone 12 review last month, went to get another cup of coffee, came back, and boom, the MacBook Pro I was using had kernel panicked. This machine hadn’t kernel panicked in years. It hasn’t kernel panicked again since. Murphy’s Law was trying to screw me.
I hadn’t saved what I’d written yet. Now, it was only a few hundred words, but they were an important few hundred words, the ones that got me started. The words that got the wheels turning, that got momentum going.
Rebooted. Took a sip of coffee. Logged in.
Looked at BBEdit. There it was. Right where I left off.
That’s BBEdit.
★ Thursday, 19 November 2020