Someone Asks Slashdot about moving from Filemaker to Open Source Software As always, Some of the answers were insightful, while some just useless or offtopic, so there's your disclaimer.

Moving to any other database system requires three things to be in order: your structure (tables, fields, etc), your data (duh), and the interface the user sees. Open Source software provides good alternatives for the first, and the second options (if you count writing scripts to massage the exported data a good option, there are lots of great Open Source languages that do that, and lots of open source or free SQL-based databases to store your data inside), but very few ways of moving the GUI from a desktop-based database application over to the Free Software world (without having to code your own).

If I did any more writing, this Palm-Device-With-Keyboard-And-Other-Things looks like it might fit the need for a light, portable, long battery life machine. Alas, I do comparatively little writing.

Plus, since my Powerbook died and I had to reinstall the OS, I've found that I get significantly better battery life.).

[Thanks BoingBoing!]

As some of you might know, BBEdit 8.0 was released yesterday. I've got a few comments in general about it, and one massive issue...

They removed ALL support for ckid resources!

Now, back in the day, Apple's Projector source code system used ckid resources as a way to mark what a file's state was (had someone else checked it out for editing, or had it's contents been changed).

Currently, MacCVSPro also uses this information as both a legacy technology, and to act as a check in ckid aware editors, "Hey, you're about to edit that file there. Are you sure, or are you just looking?" kind of thing.

I totally understand removing Toolserver support, and getting rid of the Projector menu... but why are you ignoring my precious ckid resources?

I guess technology moves on... but man will I miss that feature

Other notes on BBEdit 8 by Wolf Rentzsch