Worthy Mac OS X Software: Sticky Windows and BBEdit 8.0 August 30th

Donelleschi released a first version of a new piece of software the other day: Sticky Windows. It brings tabs (better known from most modern web browsers) to the Mac OS X desktop.

How does this differ from hiding or minimizing to the dock? Minimizing to the dock does, well, only minimize to the Dock. Only to one place on your desktop, the window you minimized last shows up at the bottom (or the right end if you have your Dock horizontally aligned). Hiding? Hiding affects a complete application, as in it doesn’t work on the window level. Sticky Windows sits somewhere in between. It keeps a fragment of an application’s window visible while working on a window level. It shows the window’s title along with a very tiny icon to control the tab (show, hide, close, ..).

The current version (1.0 ß) does work, however it misbehaves on occasion, randomly hides non-tabbed windows, the menubar icon drops off the face of the earth but, well, it’s a beta and it’s a start. It’s cheap too!

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In other news, Barebones Software released BBEdit 8.0 today. It supposedly contains more than 100 new features.

What’s the most notable of those? I think it’s the Documents Drawer and the new Navigation Bar respectively. Those finally allow for having multiple documents in a single window, which is, Exposé aside, a huge bargain. And it’s the setup we used to know and love with screen and Vim back in the days.

Still, $49 for an upgrade from 7.x (which is barely a year old) is not the cheapest thing you can get (especially since we have SubEthaEdit around).

In a related note, John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame created an Apache Configuration Language Module using the new codeless language module support of BBEdit 8.0.