Focus: Bare Bones Utilities For Mac Users.

Remember Lotus 1-2-3? That was often considered the first application so good people would buy a PC just to use it.

Is there such an application on a Mac? Bare Bone’s flagship program carried similar praise for years.

As part of our focus on Mac developers, it would be difficult if not irresponsible not to list Bare Bones’ contribution to Mac success.

Bare Bones’ BBEdit text editor is just one of many products for the Mac, though one that some Mac users say is a good reason to own a Mac.

BBEdit has won awards for years as the premier text editor on the Mac, and now on Mac OS X. Ron and I have used it for years, as did Mac360’s founder, Tera Patricks.

Few text editors have such an abundance of GUI-inspired features which allow for rapid search, easy editing, and efficient text manipulation.

If you don’t know these terms, don’t worry. BBEdit handles them fine, and adds to your overall productivity. Grep pattern matching, multiple search and replace options across folders and files.

There’s also support for AppleScript, Mac OS X uniz scripting, clippings, and a near complete set of HTML tools.

My favorite is “live” display of rendered HTML and CSS, and instant code validation.

At the other end of the scale is TextWrangler, Bare Bones’ bare bones text editor. If you’re new to editing, coding, text manipulation, this is a place to start.

TextWrangler is more than a great general purpose editor, as it brings in many features found on earlier versions of BBEdit, it’s also priced right. Free.

In between is another Bare Bones application for the rest of us. We’re those concerned with productivity on a Mac but not necessarily in need of the best text editor on the planet.

Enter Yojimbo, one of the coolest, easiest-to-use, most sophisticated Mac organizers ever. Ever.

Bare Bones says Yojimbo is so sophisticated and so simple that there is no learning curve. You may need need the comprehensive manual, but Yojimbo makes organizing computer information easier than any other Mac application.

Text, bookmarks, passwords, PDF files, serial numbers, graphics, Yojimbo takes it all. How? Drag and drop. Whatever you want saved, stored, organized, available, Yojimbo holds it until you’re ready.

The interface is deadly simple and looks like iTunes, iPhoto, and many Mac applications with the familiar left column list, right column detail.

Bare Bones is a long time Mac developer with a large following of users and award winning Mac apps, including the popular Mailsmith. Yes, email is free on the Mac with Mail, Thunderbird, and others.

Mailsmith is email for those who get lots of email and need both high security and instant search capability. Bare Bones is a leading Mac applications developer and has been for years.