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A friend has sent you a link to the following article: http://mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/270/ Everyone who works on this web site has a favorite text editor. Tera swears by BareBones’ BBEdit. Alex prefers VI (or is it “vi?“). Me? I like what works and doesn’t cost much. Fortunately, the Mac has plenty of text editors. One of the best, BareBones’ Text Wrangler (what’s with the cowboy motif?) but it’s $49. Well, it was $49 until last week when BareBones lowered the price by $49. That makes Text Wrangler a free download and a free text editor, too. Click Here, check out the specs, download it, try it out for yourself. Now, if you know what a text editor “really” does for you, then you know about BBEdit and other quality editors. If not, well, you’re like me and a gazillion other Mac users who get along just fine with AppleWorks, TextEdit, and for the richer among our readers, Microsoft Word. A text editor is NOT a word processor. And Text Wrangler does more than just text writing, so don’t think of it as a word processor. Hmmm. Text Wrangler really processes words in a way much different and perhaps more sophisticated than, say MS Word, soooo… Nevermind. You get the idea. Text Wrangler is great for programmers, editors (those, like me, who dink around with PHP and Perl code), and anyone working on so-called “code” but doesn’t want to spend an arm and a leg (like the $179 they charge for BBEdit). There’s multiple undo, multiple clipboards, splittable windows, multi-file search and replace, text transformations, line sorting, flexible “grep” style pattern-based search (Tera says this is a good thing), and much more. In case you didn’t know or don’t care, Unix text and Windows text and DOS text and Mac text are not the same thing (really!), and Text Wrangler doesn’t care either. It just handles it (shoulda been called “TextHandler”). For FREE you also get syntax coloring and function navigation for ANSI C, C++, Fortran, Java, Object Pascal, Objective-C, Perl, Python, Rez, Tcl, TeX, and Unix shell scripts. See? Do I know my way around unix or what? What. If you deal with text and not word processing (reports, documents, et al.) then you’ll appreciate what you get with Text Wrangler. Did I mention that it’s free? Why is BareBones giving it away for free? I don’t have a clue. However, they’re probably feeling some competition from the low end (which, BBEdit at $179 is NOT) so this is one way to stomp out some competition (hard to compete against full featured and free) and get more people to use a real text editor. They might upgrade to BBEdit? Is Text Wrangler worth free? Oh yeah. Just do it already. Now, here’s the one that costs $10 and it’s like sooooo worth it already. I was trolling some updates in NewsFire and came across an upgrade to SonicMoodsX. The description sounded decent. Mood music. Depending on who’s fed me, what they fed me, and what time of the month it is, I have some moods. SonicMoods sounded like a way to bring some mood steadying experience to my Mac. That’s what I got. Mood music on my Mac. Don’t get me wrong. I like cranking up iTunes through my stereo speakers and let it all hang out (but I do that while I’m alone). There are times when that’s just not the right mood (not to mention that it disturbs the neighbors and whoever’s watching). {embed=“360adserver/content_body”}SonicMoodX provides a soothing background of lovely, melodic tones when you don’t want ordinary canned music breaking your concentration. Think of it as screensaver music. Chimes. Tubular bells. Crystals. Goblin. Kalimba. Marimba. Tinkle bell. All mixed together with choir backgrounds, whistles (quite, not cat calls), koto, cello, oboe, violin and flute. And more. It’s just, like, you know—awesome background music. SonicMood’s interface is like iTunes. Music themes to the left. Instruments to the right. There’s even a graphical wind chime which sits on your Mac’s screen. You control the motion with a slider. Horse Latitudes (as in nothing moves too much) to Hurricane Andrew (the chimes, they are a changin’—fast). You can also drag and drop your own photos into a slide show while you listen to the chime-like sounds. I say “chime-like” because it’s much more sophisticated than just chimes. There’s “thoughtful” moods, happy moods, and a couple that I can’t really describe (and one or two that are annoyingly beautiful). It’s like having a bit ‘o paradise around you all the time. Well, that’s what the developer thought because they’re called Bit of Paradise Products. Click Here to view the site and download SonicMood. You get to try it out for 30 days and the price is a simple $10. The first day of moods is worth that by itself. There you go. One free and one for $10. Or, depending on how you look at it, two great Mac applications that are poles apart, but average only $5.00 each. Or, one for free, and great music for just 2.7-cents per day. Are Macs great or what?