Two programs have captured my heart lately. (I really like that they’re free, too!) SubEthaEdit is an extremely smart, collaborative text editor for groups. Cyberduck is a beautiful, aqualicious FTP client. They are both gorgeous, easy to use, and fantastic Mac OS X denizens. They never crash, do everything I want, and did I mention they don’t cost anything for non-commercial use? I found Cyberduck first, back when I was looking for an FTP program on VersionTracker. It was from within Cyberduck that I found out about SubEthaEdit.
Cyberduck (developed by David Kocher) is very standards-compliant and allows the user to use an External Editor to tweak text files on a remote server almost as if it was on the local host. I say almost, but that’s only because I am on dialup, and so there is a visible delay time as the files are shuffled back and forth. For the rest of you lucky people out there in DSL or Broadband land, Cyberduck is transparent. In the Preferences pane, they have a list of programs compliant with the External Editor Protocol, which is where I found SubEthaEdit.
The Coding Monkeys is apparently a group of German guys who make great Mac software. They’ve even won awards. Their one program to date is SubEthaEdit. They have designed it to color documents for you, in order to make various types of code easier to read. Then you can invite people to edit these documents with you, all the while monitoring what they do and chat with them. I haven’t had a need to collaborate with anyone using it, but I can see how it could become an indispensable tool. Their website is also gorgeous.
So these two programs are able to talk to each other so well because they follow something called ODB or the External Editor Protocol. I can’t find out what ODB stands for any where. It is, apparently, something software developers can integrate into a program so that it plays well with others. BareBones, makers of BBEdit, seem to have started the concept and made an SDK. Marco Merzwaren also picked up the idea. Now there are lots of FTP and text editor programs that are compliant with the ODB External Editor Suite.
What is missing is an ODB graphics editor, or even a plug-in for any pre-existing programs. I don’t have the programming chops to put two and two together anymore, but I wish somebody did. Is this kind of thing up anybody’s alley? To have HTML/PHP editing, visual CSS editing (a la CSSEdit) and graphics editing all tied into FTP would be a complete website editing suite. I think that because this protocol wasn’t sponsored by Apple that it may fall by the wayside. Darn.
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