I've been using TextMate as my editor for a while, but it keeps amazing me every day. Today, I stumbled upon this cool screencast that shows off how easy it is to extend TextMate with Cocoa. You can add in custom dialogs, pipe in data from various sources and integrate it with the rest of TextMate.

This is mostly possible simply because of the coolness of Apple's Cocoa: the ability to drag and drop together not just dialogs, but the underlying model and controllers, is great. It's also the thing that confused me most when I first started doing Cocoa, because I had to unlearn the old principle that no behaviour is possible without code.

Using OS X's built-in Interface Builder and TextMate's tm_dialog command, he builds an SVN revision list viewer in a few easy steps. You can clearly see how Interface Builder is much more than a fancy dialog editor.

Intro to tm_dialog

Also, if you're still not convinced TextMate is the bee's knees, check out these 'casts about HTML editing:

Inserting HTML tags
HTML transformations

Yes, I'm sure you can do all this in arcane editors of old as well, but TextMate makes it easy to go from novice to expert, as every one of these commands is exposed in the UI in a transparent and consistent manner.

I got back earlier today from Amsterdam after CDH (see below). We had a smashing weekend with lots of things being done. The atmosphere and vibe was great. When I compare it to BarCamp and DrupalCon Amsterdam, there were a couple of things which made CDH much better:

• Focus: when everyone is there to make things in Cocoa, the productivity soars. Instead of watching and giving presentation after presentation, people are actually sitting down and getting some work done.
• Great location: the event took place in a very big room with tons of space. It was actually a video exhibition which we commandeered for our own geeky purposes. Or maybe we became part of the exhibition?

  We started off with some table 'islands' spread around, but ended up with one big table. It felt like a cross between a bar, a garden party and an office. This allowed everyone to move around easily and always see what was going on. Big thumbs up to Mediamatic for offering up space.

• Great people: everyone was very friendly, very open. Thanks to the organisers (Katie Lips, Paul Stringer, Andy Smith) for setting it up.
• No Schedule: in contrast to DrupalCon and OSCMS, the atmosphere was much more relaxed and fluid, because there was no rigid timetable and pace to keep. Everyone who was there was always doing something (coding, testing or just plain learning).

If we have a Drupal coding sprint sometime which is only even half as good as CDHA, I'll be very happy indeed.

There's a less serious anecdote which could explain the high productivity though. Due to the particulars of the room (lawn chairs, rubber floor, ...) there was a serious build up of static electricity everywhere. Any geek who deserted his post and came back later to his or her shiny metal PowerBook would get zapped when touching it. All the more reason to keep coding. Hoorah for positive reinforcement electrotherapy!