Yep. And just like for a lot of those companies there may not be any economic advantage to playing nice with the lesser markets. In this case, if taking advantage of the added features of aac over mp3 allow OP to gain more listeners for his podcast than he would lose by switching, then the decision is a pretty simple one... you switch (unless he were to set up multiple feeds, one for each format). If not, then, again the decision is pretty simple.
Is it really a sizable percentage? Obviously he'd have to ask the listeners, but anyone with an iPod can play aac (and I'd guess many of the newer players do as well), and the iPod is the dominant player on the market...
And bookmarking is much more than pausing. If I'm listening to an audiobook or podcast (say in the car on the way home), and I deceide to go out for a run, I can just switch over to a music playlist for that then come right back to the spot I left off at in the audiobook when I'm finished working out. Your "pause button" solution doesn't work so well there unless I have a separate player... In addition, I can play a bookmarkable file on my iPod, then when I plug it into my computer, it updates the corresponding file on the computer via iTunes, so I can listen to it there starting up where I left off.
Yep. And in addition to that, the creator (well anybody) can also add predefined chapter settings, which is really nice for longer, multi-section files. O'Reilly had a nice little intro to Apple's ChapterTool the other day.
I mean the satellite option is neat and all, but the speed pretty much sucks if you use that option, the interface is lousy (typing everything in one entry field may appeal to some, not to me), and the direction finding algorithm can sometimes give plenty crap results (like routing a drive from Albuquerque to Cleveland through Denver and Omaha rather than the much shorter straight shot through Oklahoma and Missouri.
About the only thing that they do better than, say Yahoo maps is the panning and zooming control of their maps.
Reasoning, common sense, and (back then) faith all told us the earth was flat.
No. Common sense may have told us the Earth was flat (or flat with bumpy things all over it), but reasoning by guys like Aristotle and Eratosthenes (and probably many others whose names have been lost to time) was able to convince them and others that the Earth was round and to estimate its circumference.
Reasonable people have believed the Earth to be round for millennia.
I see what you're saying here, of course. That you need some external framework to reason about new information. And I have no real beef with that. I'm just in a persnickety mood and your flat Earth comment bugged me.
Think of it this way. Lisp fans are a lot like Yankees fans. You might hate them for being so smug, and you might revel in picking on the one or two large failures associated with the object of their affection, but when it comes right down to it, they've got some very good reasons for being smug.
And for the record, the Yankees can go screw. Go Tribe!
The people who are buying ipods are trendy hipsters.
Except when they're not...
Sometimes they're people who use Apples as their primary computer (or at least their primary computer for storing/playing mp3s[1]). I've yet to see an mp3 player other than iPod who's interface with the Mac could be described as much beyond "pathetic".[2]
Sometimes they're people who reviewed their needs and found an iPod was the best fit for them. A good example of this would be me. I found that a Shuffle suited my needs better than any other player on the market at the time. Now, it may be a Nano, or something different -- then it wasn't.
Sometime's they're people who think mp3 player=iPod -- they aren't even aware (or are only barely aware) that other companies make mp3 players. A good example of this would be my mother -- of course she called me before buying one and I sent her my old MuVo that was lying on the shelf collecting dust. Of course, she doesn't use that player anyway, as the human interface pretty much sucks for someone who is not overly familiar with their computer. She would actually be much better served by picking up an iPod which integrates seamlessly with iTunes. Note. This is a potentially huge group -- likely far larger than the "trendy hipster" demographic.
Sometimes they're people who find the interface on the iPod to be much better than that of the competition. E.g. navigation on my MuVo pretty much sucked ass (though it was better than the shuffle in some regards). And they find that to be much more important to them than the features that the iPod doesn't have. And of course there is a huge class of people who don't want all those other features -- believe it or not most of the world could care less about things like gapless playback, ogg support, or voice memos.
And as always, there are the brand jockeys and trendy hipsters. But these people exist for every product, and pretty much every brand...
But hey, I get that it's easier to toss off a dismissive generalization than it is to actually think about something.
[1] I use mp3 throughout to refer to a whole swath of digital audio formats, as I'm too lazy to type everything out. [2] Of course I stopped looking after buying my player last year. Thing may have changed, but I doubt it...
yet whoever made and approved that commercial (presumably adults) thought it was and had no idea what real l33t skillz are.
While this is likely a true statement, it is also way besides the point. The people who put the commercial together had about four seconds of time to give the kid... it's kind of hard to show off any "real l33t skillz" in four seconds. On top of that, that commercial isn't really aimed at the true hackers (who I would guess wouldn't fit in too well in a military environment, but that might just be off-the-mark stereotyping). It's aimed at the person who knows something about computers and who would find it cool to be given the opportunity to learn more and deploy those skills on the government's dime. That's a far bigger pool of potential recruits than the those with "real l33t skillz".
Open source stuff, installs, usually without any reboot,
Unless, of course, it doesn't. While things are getting better, the number of times a configure; make; make install run works properly is still far too low. Adding to this are the far too high number of packages that toss an "oh yeah... you also need to download and install packages X, Y, Z, and libSnood first, then alter Makefile.in appropriately," at the installer (who may have no clue what the appropriate changes to make are). Admittedly, a lot of this is made better via package management systems, but they aren't exactly foolproof either. There was an entry over at Mac DevCenter about the subversion packages being broken for both Fink and DarwinPorts. That's the kind of stuff that's truly maddening.
If I do need help there is usually better documentation than the commercial stuff provides
Wow. What kind of crap products are you buying? Documentation is the single biggest annoyance that I have when it comes to OSS. People just don't want to take the time to write something that is both complete and clear to a newcomer. Again, things are a bit nicer now that a developer can throw up a wiki and rely on his userbase to write the documentation for him, but it's still no great shakes.
The most annoying example of this that I had lately? Trying to figure out how to use OpenMCL to compile some code as a standalone, native app. The ability to do this is listed as one of its features, but I'll be damned if I can find that information in the "documentation". This is covered (albeit in a less than stellar manner) in e.g. the Franz-Allegro documentation.
and practical help is much easier to get if I should need it.
Well, here you're pretty much right. There are an awful lot of mailing lists, newsgroups, etc. out there where you can get help in a jiffy. Some of them still suffer from the RTFM disease, but this is getting much better.
A laptop would enable me to do a number of things that a pen and paper wouldn't ( or wouldn't do as well):
I can enter my notes into an application like DEVONthink which not only allows me to keep rich notes with wiki-style linking, but also allows me to search my old notes, papers, etc. for similar content (or just some phrase/topic) and present me with the top matches in a snap. This is no more distracting than writing notes and drawing figures during class.
I can hook up a camera like an iSight (or other) to record portions (or all) of the lecture for review back in the dorms. This is less distracting than writing, as I only need to check the frame every now and again.
Ditto for audio recording.
I can have a window open with my OCaml/Lisp/whatever REPL open to try out concepts as the professor relays them. Looking at code on a board or screen doesn't help me understand it nearly as much as typing it and running it. Slightly more distracting than handwriting, but with a bigger payoff.
I can more efficiently annotate PDFs.
I can use an editor like SubEthaEdit to take notes in a collaborative manner with my classmates, possibly even having a backchannel discussion about the material without disrupting the class. Again, more distracting, but with a much higher payoff.
And of course, most importantly, I can watch porn.
Now *that's* a pointless exercise. You spend an hour in class recording the lecture, compacting it down to where... it takes an hour to review the class.
Depends on what you do with it. I know that there were times I wished I could have had a recording of the class to go over something i either missed or thought I understood during the lecture. If you have a big enough hard drive or a DVD burner, then you could archive a full college education of lectures quite easily. It's a wonderful way to augment your handwritten notes.
And as for taking an hour to review a class, that's only true if you want listen all the way through. But being the random access creatures they are, one doesn't need to do that with audio files.
Yeah, better install Linux, because god knows MikTeX, emacs, and vim aren't available for Windows...
But I do agree with you. Once you learn LaTeX you will spit on anything like equation editor for the rest of your life. These days I can write math in tex almost as fast as I can by hand.
the author states he's moving onto the next development tree, and the current version is 39 euro with no mention of the possibility to freely upgrade to 2.0 whenever that comes out (if the upgrade would even fix the bugs!).
You may wonder if this will be the 2.0 release, and likely it will. But it will be a free upgrade for all registered users. Though please do not buy TextMate today for what you think may come in 2.0. I make absolutely no promises about what future versions will contain, and I reserve the right to completely change my mind on what it should contain!
They allow for better (well, different) organisation of code, easier reuse, and improved encapsulation over procedural or functional coding styles
And I'm not even sure I'd go that far. Consider, for example, OCaml's module and functor system which allows for a very high degree of code reuse, and a type of encapsulation. It certainly allows for information hiding and a tight type-based relationship between data and functionality.
Not to mention the fact that there were plenty of other public key encryption schemes available... Sure, few of them had been analyzed like RSA had, and a few proved to be flawed over time (as RSA itself might someday), but they were there. E.g. Rabin and El Gamal were unpatented (and the tenuous Diffe-Hellman claim to El Gamal expired in 1997).
Patenting mathematical algorithms would be like patenting entire scientific phenomena {such as the transfer of heat from a warm body to a cooler one} as opposed to inventions that exploit those phenomena {such as a cooking stove}.
And I'm guessing that the RSA patent only covered the application of Fermat's little theorem (not quite, but close enough) to cryptographic uses (encryption and signing). If you could use it for, I don't know... making perfect flapjacks, you'd have been perfectly free to do so. The deal is that it's just not that useful outside of cryptography. It's no different than getting a patent on using a bimetal strip to build a thermostat. The properties of the bimetal strip aren't patented, just their use in that one arena. The math in RSA isn't patented, just its use in cryptographic applications.
Even before Napier published the first ever book of log tables, the relationship (a ** b) * (a ** c) == a ** (b + c) still held.
And astonishingly enough, even before [insert patented physical device here] was invented, the physics that allowed it to work the way it does still held. But you think that combining Widget A and Widget B to produce Result C is somehow more patentable than combining Number A and Number B to produce Result D?
I had a MuVo, which I gave to my mother when I picked up a Shuffle. Am I under the impression that the Shuffle is the perfect player? No. Would I recommend it to everyone? No. Would I recommend it to people whose needs and use patterns are similar to mine? Yes... but I'd suggest looking at the Nano as well.
There are good and bad points to all of the players out there. For example, the shuffle is light, very small, supports bookmarkable files, and allows you to skip them while in shuffle mode (no need to skip past that audiobook while out for a run), it has the best interface on the Mac, and being bright white is easy to spot on my cluttered desk. On the other hand, there is no "skip album" feature, no "skip N songs" feature, and no screen, so navigating long playlists (especially those where you don't remember which songs are where) is a pain in the ass (fortunately, none of these are really a problem for how I use it: audiobooks in the car, random songs when I run/bike). It's too easy to hit the next/previous track buttons when trying to adjust the volume, it's too easy to shift it into shuffle mode when you want straight play mode, and the battery status button is way too non-responsive.
And of course there's the battery issue: do you want the long term pain of a dead battery a few years down the road and no ability to recharge without a powered USB port nearby, or do you prefer the shorter, repeated pain of constantly switching out batteries, but with the ability to change them on a bus or on top of a mountain?
Bottom line, there is no "best player", only "best current player for a specific set of needs".
And what does this have to do with static v. dynamic typing? You either need sketchy implicit conversions from on type to another, explicit conversions to (and possibly from) a single intermediate type, or repeated code for each of the different types. Static typing can handle this via means such as Haskell's type classes or good old fashioned algebraic types. E.g.
type multi = Int of int | Float of float | String of string;;
let multi_exp arg =
let f =
match arg with
| Int i -> float i
| Float f -> f
| String s -> float_of_string s in
exp f;;
It's a bit more work than relying on implicit conversions, but generally speaking, much safer.
If you are a BBEdit user, and you have a complaint about the software, then tell them.
I have. Well most of my comploints have been about Mailsmith. Bare Bones standard reply: Thanks for the suggestion. We do not discuss future plans for our software, but we will consider your suggestion. Swell... meanwhile Mailsmith still has yet to even sniff IMAP... No thanks. Give me something like Textmate, where the developer spells out his plans clearly, and will tell you straight up if a feature will be added or not (or examined for feasibility).
As for BBEdit, I will confess that I have not tried version 8 (or any of the later version 7 releases), as they had lost me by then. But my complaints boil down to the fact that they sat on their asses and got lapped by the competition before making changes (hell, they didn't get syntax highlighting that didn't require CodeWarrior until a year or so ago? The hell?). They were pretty good for web development, but they were seriously lacking when it came to general text editing, especially programming. And now, they offer nothing that's not available in other editors for half the price (TextMate) or free (vim, smultron, etc.). Seriously, what can BBEdit do that the other editors cannot?
They used to be ahead of the game, that's when they made their bones. They they became the only game in town, that's when they started coasting. Then they fell behind. Now they're playing catch up...
Yeah, the single step undo is annoying, and is one of the longest standing complaints Allan has had to field, as well as things like lacking a "repeat following command X times" functionality. But it's still a pretty solid editor. It's the first one that's been able to pry me away from vim on the Mac...
Meh. BBEdit is grossly overpriced, even with their dumbass "crossgrade" from TextWrangler. Vim, TextEdit, emacs, and smultron are each far better editors at far better prices. And SubEthaEdit is pretty decent with an unbeatable price as well.
The folk over at BareBones have been cruising on reputation far too long with their substandard products...
Sadly O'Caml isn't the answer either, it doesn't have a remotely decent web application framework.
I honestly don't know if it's something that could be considered remotely decent (I don't do web apps and thus have no first-hand experience with it, or well, anything else in the genre), but have you looked at AS/Xcaml?
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. And just like for a lot of those companies there may not be any economic advantage to playing nice with the lesser markets. In this case, if taking advantage of the added features of aac over mp3 allow OP to gain more listeners for his podcast than he would lose by switching, then the decision is a pretty simple one... you switch (unless he were to set up multiple feeds, one for each format). If not, then, again the decision is pretty simple.
This isn't rocket science.
Yeah. After all, there are so many audio players out there that support the Speex format...
Is it really a sizable percentage? Obviously he'd have to ask the listeners, but anyone with an iPod can play aac (and I'd guess many of the newer players do as well), and the iPod is the dominant player on the market...
And bookmarking is much more than pausing. If I'm listening to an audiobook or podcast (say in the car on the way home), and I deceide to go out for a run, I can just switch over to a music playlist for that then come right back to the spot I left off at in the audiobook when I'm finished working out. Your "pause button" solution doesn't work so well there unless I have a separate player... In addition, I can play a bookmarkable file on my iPod, then when I plug it into my computer, it updates the corresponding file on the computer via iTunes, so I can listen to it there starting up where I left off.
Bookmarking and chapters are a very good thing.
Yep. And in addition to that, the creator (well anybody) can also add predefined chapter settings, which is really nice for longer, multi-section files. O'Reilly had a nice little intro to Apple's ChapterTool the other day.
Erm... I may be way out of the times here, but doesn't Perl use the Artistic license?
Meh. I don't get the love of google maps.
I mean the satellite option is neat and all, but the speed pretty much sucks if you use that option, the interface is lousy (typing everything in one entry field may appeal to some, not to me), and the direction finding algorithm can sometimes give plenty crap results (like routing a drive from Albuquerque to Cleveland through Denver and Omaha rather than the much shorter straight shot through Oklahoma and Missouri.
About the only thing that they do better than, say Yahoo maps is the panning and zooming control of their maps.
Reasoning, common sense, and (back then) faith all told us the earth was flat.
No. Common sense may have told us the Earth was flat (or flat with bumpy things all over it), but reasoning by guys like Aristotle and Eratosthenes (and probably many others whose names have been lost to time) was able to convince them and others that the Earth was round and to estimate its circumference.
Reasonable people have believed the Earth to be round for millennia.
I see what you're saying here, of course. That you need some external framework to reason about new information. And I have no real beef with that. I'm just in a persnickety mood and your flat Earth comment bugged me.
So there.
Think of it this way. Lisp fans are a lot like Yankees fans. You might hate them for being so smug, and you might revel in picking on the one or two large failures associated with the object of their affection, but when it comes right down to it, they've got some very good reasons for being smug.
And for the record, the Yankees can go screw. Go Tribe!
Except when they're not...
But hey, I get that it's easier to toss off a dismissive generalization than it is to actually think about something.
[1] I use mp3 throughout to refer to a whole swath of digital audio formats, as I'm too lazy to type everything out.
[2] Of course I stopped looking after buying my player last year. Thing may have changed, but I doubt it...
yet whoever made and approved that commercial (presumably adults) thought it was and had no idea what real l33t skillz are.
While this is likely a true statement, it is also way besides the point.
The people who put the commercial together had about four seconds of time to give the kid... it's kind of hard to show off any "real l33t skillz" in four seconds. On top of that, that commercial isn't really aimed at the true hackers (who I would guess wouldn't fit in too well in a military environment, but that might just be off-the-mark stereotyping). It's aimed at the person who knows something about computers and who would find it cool to be given the opportunity to learn more and deploy those skills on the government's dime. That's a far bigger pool of potential recruits than the those with "real l33t skillz".
Open source stuff, installs, usually without any reboot,
Unless, of course, it doesn't.
While things are getting better, the number of times a configure; make; make install run works properly is still far too low. Adding to this are the far too high number of packages that toss an "oh yeah... you also need to download and install packages X, Y, Z, and libSnood first, then alter Makefile.in appropriately," at the installer (who may have no clue what the appropriate changes to make are). Admittedly, a lot of this is made better via package management systems, but they aren't exactly foolproof either. There was an entry over at Mac DevCenter about the subversion packages being broken for both Fink and DarwinPorts. That's the kind of stuff that's truly maddening.
If I do need help there is usually better documentation than the commercial stuff provides
Wow. What kind of crap products are you buying? Documentation is the single biggest annoyance that I have when it comes to OSS. People just don't want to take the time to write something that is both complete and clear to a newcomer. Again, things are a bit nicer now that a developer can throw up a wiki and rely on his userbase to write the documentation for him, but it's still no great shakes.
The most annoying example of this that I had lately? Trying to figure out how to use OpenMCL to compile some code as a standalone, native app. The ability to do this is listed as one of its features, but I'll be damned if I can find that information in the "documentation". This is covered (albeit in a less than stellar manner) in e.g. the Franz-Allegro documentation.
and practical help is much easier to get if I should need it.
Well, here you're pretty much right. There are an awful lot of mailing lists, newsgroups, etc. out there where you can get help in a jiffy. Some of them still suffer from the RTFM disease, but this is getting much better.
A laptop would enable me to do a number of things that a pen and paper wouldn't ( or wouldn't do as well):
I can enter my notes into an application like DEVONthink which not only allows me to keep rich notes with wiki-style linking, but also allows me to search my old notes, papers, etc. for similar content (or just some phrase/topic) and present me with the top matches in a snap. This is no more distracting than writing notes and drawing figures during class.
I can hook up a camera like an iSight (or other) to record portions (or all) of the lecture for review back in the dorms. This is less distracting than writing, as I only need to check the frame every now and again.
Ditto for audio recording.
I can have a window open with my OCaml/Lisp/whatever REPL open to try out concepts as the professor relays them. Looking at code on a board or screen doesn't help me understand it nearly as much as typing it and running it. Slightly more distracting than handwriting, but with a bigger payoff.
I can more efficiently annotate PDFs.
I can use an editor like SubEthaEdit to take notes in a collaborative manner with my classmates, possibly even having a backchannel discussion about the material without disrupting the class. Again, more distracting, but with a much higher payoff.
And of course, most importantly, I can watch porn.
Now *that's* a pointless exercise. You spend an hour in class recording the lecture, compacting it down to where... it takes an hour to review the class.
Depends on what you do with it. I know that there were times I wished I could have had a recording of the class to go over something i either missed or thought I understood during the lecture. If you have a big enough hard drive or a DVD burner, then you could archive a full college education of lectures quite easily. It's a wonderful way to augment your handwritten notes.
And as for taking an hour to review a class, that's only true if you want listen all the way through. But being the random access creatures they are, one doesn't need to do that with audio files.
Yeah, better install Linux, because god knows MikTeX, emacs, and vim aren't available for Windows...
But I do agree with you. Once you learn LaTeX you will spit on anything like equation editor for the rest of your life. These days I can write math in tex almost as fast as I can by hand.
Don't be so lazy next time, and try actually reading the blog entry where the new branch was mentioned...
They allow for better (well, different) organisation of code, easier reuse, and improved encapsulation over procedural or functional coding styles
And I'm not even sure I'd go that far. Consider, for example, OCaml's module and functor system which allows for a very high degree of code reuse, and a type of encapsulation. It certainly allows for information hiding and a tight type-based relationship between data and functionality.
Not to mention the fact that there were plenty of other public key encryption schemes available... Sure, few of them had been analyzed like RSA had, and a few proved to be flawed over time (as RSA itself might someday), but they were there. E.g. Rabin and El Gamal were unpatented (and the tenuous Diffe-Hellman claim to El Gamal expired in 1997).
Patenting mathematical algorithms would be like patenting entire scientific phenomena {such as the transfer of heat from a warm body to a cooler one} as opposed to inventions that exploit those phenomena {such as a cooking stove}.
And I'm guessing that the RSA patent only covered the application of Fermat's little theorem (not quite, but close enough) to cryptographic uses (encryption and signing). If you could use it for, I don't know... making perfect flapjacks, you'd have been perfectly free to do so. The deal is that it's just not that useful outside of cryptography. It's no different than getting a patent on using a bimetal strip to build a thermostat. The properties of the bimetal strip aren't patented, just their use in that one arena. The math in RSA isn't patented, just its use in cryptographic applications.
Even before Napier published the first ever book of log tables, the relationship (a ** b) * (a ** c) == a ** (b + c) still held.
And astonishingly enough, even before [insert patented physical device here] was invented, the physics that allowed it to work the way it does still held. But you think that combining Widget A and Widget B to produce Result C is somehow more patentable than combining Number A and Number B to produce Result D?
Why? Because you can touch them?
Heh. Had I mod points they would be yours.
I had a MuVo, which I gave to my mother when I picked up a Shuffle. Am I under the impression that the Shuffle is the perfect player? No. Would I recommend it to everyone? No. Would I recommend it to people whose needs and use patterns are similar to mine? Yes... but I'd suggest looking at the Nano as well.
There are good and bad points to all of the players out there. For example, the shuffle is light, very small, supports bookmarkable files, and allows you to skip them while in shuffle mode (no need to skip past that audiobook while out for a run), it has the best interface on the Mac, and being bright white is easy to spot on my cluttered desk. On the other hand, there is no "skip album" feature, no "skip N songs" feature, and no screen, so navigating long playlists (especially those where you don't remember which songs are where) is a pain in the ass (fortunately, none of these are really a problem for how I use it: audiobooks in the car, random songs when I run/bike). It's too easy to hit the next/previous track buttons when trying to adjust the volume, it's too easy to shift it into shuffle mode when you want straight play mode, and the battery status button is way too non-responsive.
And of course there's the battery issue: do you want the long term pain of a dead battery a few years down the road and no ability to recharge without a powered USB port nearby, or do you prefer the shorter, repeated pain of constantly switching out batteries, but with the ability to change them on a bus or on top of a mountain?
Bottom line, there is no "best player", only "best current player for a specific set of needs".
And what does this have to do with static v. dynamic typing? You either need sketchy implicit conversions from on type to another, explicit conversions to (and possibly from) a single intermediate type, or repeated code for each of the different types. Static typing can handle this via means such as Haskell's type classes or good old fashioned algebraic types. E.g.
type multi = Int of int | Float of float | String of string;;
let multi_exp arg =
let f =
match arg with
| Int i -> float i
| Float f -> f
| String s -> float_of_string s in
exp f;;
It's a bit more work than relying on implicit conversions, but generally speaking, much safer.
If you are a BBEdit user, and you have a complaint about the software, then tell them.
I have. Well most of my comploints have been about Mailsmith. Bare Bones standard reply: Thanks for the suggestion. We do not discuss future plans for our software, but we will consider your suggestion. Swell... meanwhile Mailsmith still has yet to even sniff IMAP... No thanks. Give me something like Textmate, where the developer spells out his plans clearly, and will tell you straight up if a feature will be added or not (or examined for feasibility).
As for BBEdit, I will confess that I have not tried version 8 (or any of the later version 7 releases), as they had lost me by then. But my complaints boil down to the fact that they sat on their asses and got lapped by the competition before making changes (hell, they didn't get syntax highlighting that didn't require CodeWarrior until a year or so ago? The hell?). They were pretty good for web development, but they were seriously lacking when it came to general text editing, especially programming. And now, they offer nothing that's not available in other editors for half the price (TextMate) or free (vim, smultron, etc.). Seriously, what can BBEdit do that the other editors cannot?
They used to be ahead of the game, that's when they made their bones. They they became the only game in town, that's when they started coasting. Then they fell behind. Now they're playing catch up...
Yeah, the single step undo is annoying, and is one of the longest standing complaints Allan has had to field, as well as things like lacking a "repeat following command X times" functionality. But it's still a pretty solid editor. It's the first one that's been able to pry me away from vim on the Mac...
Meh. BBEdit is grossly overpriced, even with their dumbass "crossgrade" from TextWrangler. Vim, TextEdit, emacs, and smultron are each far better editors at far better prices. And SubEthaEdit is pretty decent with an unbeatable price as well.
The folk over at BareBones have been cruising on reputation far too long with their substandard products...
Sadly O'Caml isn't the answer either, it doesn't have a remotely decent web application framework.
I honestly don't know if it's something that could be considered remotely decent (I don't do web apps and thus have no first-hand experience with it, or well, anything else in the genre), but have you looked at AS/Xcaml?