BBEdit 9.2 was released today.

(Sorry about having two BBEdit-related posts in a row like this. I have other things to talk about too, trust me. I'm just warming up again.)

I played a small part, again. Most of my time was spent on the brand-new Lasso module. There are 168 changes in the official change notes. (There were actually a lot more than 168 changes, trust me.) The excerpt listed below includes those I'm particularly happy about or with which I was personally involved.

The blue stuff, below, is what I worked on or was somehow directly involved with.

Additions

• ✫ BBEdit now has a “Sleep” command. ✫

• Lasso is now a fully supported language, with syntax coloring, functions listed in the function popup, and automatically generated fold points.

• There’s a new color setting in the Text Colors preference: “Numeric Constants”. This can also be adjusted on a per-language basis in the appropriate language’s settings (in the “Languages” preferences).

• Added a feature to the language module interface for giving the module control over resolution of include file references.

• The Menus preferences now has a group of commands so that you can assign keyboard equivalents to operations in FTP/SFTP browsers, if desired.

• There’s a new setting in the “Editing” tab for language-specific preferences (Preferences -> Languages): “Tab width”. Edit the value here to set a language-specific value for the default tab width. (I — and probably others — requested this.)

• ✫ BBEdit now implements the necessary hooks so that the following JavaScript functions now work when using “Preview in BBEdit”: window.alert, window.confirm, window.prompt, window.onbeforeunload ✫

• Disk browsers can now explore tarballs (.tar, .tar.gz, .tgz files). When an eligible file is in the listing, it will have a disclosure triangle next to it. Twist it open to reveal the files and directories within. As with other items displayed in disk browser listings, you can view files in the editor view, or double-click them to open in a separate window for editing.

Changes

• ✫ The internal mechanics and UI presentation for recent items have been overhauled. ✫

  I love this one, as the redesigned "Open Recent" menu item is much more usable.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug in the ActionScript function parser. No longer tripped up by a function return type of * (which is the explicit way of typing something as “untyped”).

• Fixed a bug which allowed ActionScript’s get to be recognized as a function-starter in JavaScript files (similar to the function keyword).

• Fixed possible cause of a crash related to populating the function popup in JavaScript files.

• Fixed missing fold widgets for fold ranges containing a single line break.

• Fixed crash when JavaScript functions with assigned names, such as foo.bar[bat] = function() {...}, were not in a recognized/expected form.

• Fixed bug in which using “Save As” did not change the document’s language if the default was something other than “(none)”. This change also addresses a bug in which the document’s language wasn’t recalculated if the file’s name changed on disk.

• A variety of changes have been made to reduce application startup time.

• Fixed a bug in the Ruby module which would cause a multi-line, general delimited input string (%+string+) to fold incorrectly (the closing fold point was one character too soon).

• Fixed a bug in the Ruby module where Begin/End blocks could cause fold points to be be placed at seemingly random places in the document.

• Fixed a bug in the Ruby module where complete for or while loops, written on a single line and within curly braces, could throw off the folding for the entire document.

• Fixed a bug in the TeX module in which a $math$ section within a {required param}, where the $math$ section contained a closing curly brace (e.g. caption{foo $i_{0}$ foo}), would confuse the parser. This tended to manifest as incorrect autofolds and improper indentation in the function popup.

• The Ruby module will no longer detect regular expressions as the first token immediately after a string or another regular expression. This resolves a syntax coloring bug found with the syntax used by the Merb framework (which uses an overloaded ”/” method.)

Now go buy a copy. Or two. Please. More sales at BB means more work for me. (Blah blah blah |BEdit Disclaimer|)

Last week I got an email from John Mello, a reporter working for Mac News World. He asked if, as a BBEdit user, I'd be willing to be interviewed for a story he was writing about Bare Bones. I said yes, and later we talked on the phone for about a half hour.

The article is now published, entitled Apple's Changes Can't Rattle These Bones. Kinda clever.

Among BBEdit's merits cited by the code warrior are its support of multiple languages, syntax coloring, code folding and HTML editing and preview, as well as speedy performance and powerful search features. Not only can it perform a search and replace on multiple files, but it will display the results of a search in a separate window for easy review and manipulation.

Hey he called me a code warrior. That's so much nicer than code monkey! (I'm mentioned by name a couple paragraphs earlier.)

The article is, um… a bit fluffy. It never claims to be otherwise! You can't do a one-page "company profile" as hard news.

He never mentioned my rant about email clients, even though we talked about them extensively. (No surprise he didn't mention it, I really do rant.) I was slightly surprised to find that he never mentioned my relationship with the company (which is currently on hold, but hopefully not for long...). Sean was surprised, too.

A significant point I made in our conversation ("interview") that I honestly thought he'd cover: all the editors give you a decent space to type your code. You don't differentiate editors based on which one gives you the best typing experience. Know what I mean? All of the good editors provide a decent space for entering your text. What matters to me is all the other stuff that I expect of my editor: language support, syntax coloring, code folding, performance and — perhaps most important of all — really powerful search and replace.

Anyway, I don't seem to get into the news these days for anything except the PMC, so it was cool for that alone, if nothing else. :-)

Red Sweater has released MarsEdit 2.3! (Congratulations, Daniel.)

Obviously I haven't been writing much, lately, but that has to change if I'm going to do the PMC software bundles again this year. Maybe I'll start using MarsEdit and BBEdit together again.

The new MarsEdit's biggest new feature is probably it's support for Tumblr, but that doesn't affect me. What I'm happiest about is the improved Media Browser. It already hooked up to Flickr, but Daniel put some work into optimizing the experience when choosing photos to include in posts. That's handy for me, since I include so many pictures of the kids. :-)

Speaking of the kids, here's a recent favorite picture of Lauren. Just because.

Since the post went up about building your own software bundle, on Monday, I've had at least 600 offers come in.

Probably more than that. But I've lost count.

I do know that, right now, I have 341 unprocessed offers. Offers I haven't even read yet.

The thought has crossed my mind more than once that I may have made it a little too easy to build a bundle this year. :-) I can't possibly keep up. Eventually everyone will hear back from me. But it'll take awhile. Next year I need to more fully automate the system. (Duh.)

Since we went live I've added at least ten new titles to the list of what's available. Also, I ran out of the most popular apps in the first couple days, but many of them are back in the bundle builder again because the donors stepped up with larger donations! Yay!

I'm two thirds of the way to my $10,000 goal, and all but the first $1,000 of that is from selling these bundles. (That total doesn't include the $700 or so that I got for the two Adobe apps that were auctioned on eBay. Those haven't been credited to my PMC account yet.)

For the third year, I'm selling thousands of copies of mac applications, to support my fund raising efforts in the PMC.

I'm running a bit late this year, but I think I've found a great way to present the software that's available, and to make it really easy for the buyer/donor to choose what he/she wants in a bundle.

I have three targets to meet before we're done:

• $4400 by the end of September (I'm "legally committed": they'll take any balance from me, personally)
• $6700 by the end of October, to meet my "Heavy Hitter" commitment
• $10,000 by the end of December, to meet my personal goal for 2008

Please go build a bundle and make me an offer, and tell people about this however you see fit: twitter (where I am sethdill), digg, your own blog, StumbleUpon, smoke signals... whatever.