Betalogue

As I wrote in another post a couple of weeks ago, unlike previous upgrades, the BBEdit 10 upgrade has not exactly been painless for me. One thing that was particularly problematic for me was the changed behaviour of project windows. I have a project window that opens by default at startup on the left-hand side of my main screen and contains a list of many files and folders that I need to access on a regular basis.

Because it’s a list of files and folders, I keep it fairly narrow, with a width of fewer than 200 pixels. But in BBEdit 10.0, this kind of narrow width was impossible. The minimum width achievable was… over 500 pixels! This was in part due to the integrated editor window pane, but even when that editor pane was hidden, the width could not be reduced further. And then there were several other bugs with the window width: with the resizing controls, with the control to toggle the editor on and off, and so on.

I couldn’t keep such a wide window open at all times, so I had to change my work habits and close the project window when I was not using, and then reopen it manually every time I needed it.

I immediately sent an e-mail to Bare Bones’ tech support about these issues, but didn’t get a reply. Then BBEdit 10.0.1 came out and the release notes read:

This release consists entirely of fixes for reported issues, and contains no new features, nor changes to existing features.

(My emphasis.)

To me, this seemed to indicate that the revamped project window “feature” probably wasn’t fixed. I downloaded and installed the update, but didn’t have time to read the full release notes right away and was busy doing other things for a while (including, ironically, extensive work on large plain text files in BBEdit, as part of a project that start a couple of months ago and is still going strong — I have had no problems with BBEdit 10 for that work).

Then today I got an e-mail from Bare Bones apologizing for the delay in responding and indicating that “[m]ost of these [issues] should have been fixed for 10.0.1.”

And sure enough, when I opened my project window and tried making adjustments to it again, I realize that most of the problems were indeed fixed. I can now bring the width back down permanently to the narrowness that I desire, and the issues with the controls appear to have been fixed.

Out of curiosity, I searched for “project” in the 10.0.1 release notes and indeed the notes includes a relevant item:

Fixed bug in which hiding the editor pane in a project window failed to make the window narrower, as it should have.

It does not describe in full detail all the problems that have actually been fixed, but if I had searched for “project” in the release notes earlier on, I might have noticed this item and found out earlier that improvements had been made that were not deemed “changes to existing features” but still changed the revamped project window feature to bring back the width flexibility that existed before 10.0.

So if you purchased and installed BBEdit 10 and experienced problems, you might want to take a closer look at the 10.0.1 update. It does include lots of fixes and, indeed, even a few “changes.” And I must say that the quality of the tech support service offered by Bare Bones was excellent. It might not have been as responsive as one would like, but that’s understandable with the release of a major upgrade, which probably created a major peak in inquiries and complaints. Sometimes all it takes is a little bit of patience.

(I should note that there is still one change in project windows that might take some getting used to, which is that a single click is now sufficient to open a file in the list, whereas a double-click was required before BBEdit 10, at least when the editor pane was hidden. The single click makes sense when the editor is visible, but it is a bit strange when the editor is hidden, as the file opens in a separate window.)

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Tuesday, August 16th, 2011 at 9:08 am and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.