Hydra 2¶
751 words on Software
Version 2 of man and monkey's favourite text editor Hydra SEE is out. It has the magic capability of letting you co-operate on a text document with several people across your network or even the globe. That's both neat and cool. And mostly superfluous for me. I have used it on occasion, but those occasions have been rare .
However, it's still a remarkably good and fast text editor with syntax colouring and well worth using as such in its own right. The recent update came as a surprise to me as came the large jump in version numbers. That jump – probably caused by the fact that they are using a new, incompatible, network protocol now – is accompanied by a subtle icon colour change of the kind we've been seeing in iTunes for a few generations now.
But what else is new? The first thing you see is that they now seem to charge around €30 for commercial use of the application. Fair enough. The good news, it's still free for me. New features include a 'split view' and regular expressions. While I'm not sophisticated enough to have missed the latter, the former is both a classical Mac feature and tremendously useful – want to look at two places in your document at the same time? No problem. Also there seem to be more preferences and 'information bar' thingies around. Not so nice.
Which makes me start pointing out the shortcomings I see in the new version. To begin with its 'feel' seems nowhere as polished as the feel of Hydra was when I first used it. Sure, it does its editing job but by now there is quite a bit of clutter around on the screen. Let's take the two information bars, for example. I'd call anyone who needs constant visual feedback about the file's encoding, the current mode and the window width a freak. This information may be useful in certain situations – while saving, during window resizes &c but it doesn't need to waste screen real estate constantly. To add insult to injury, those displays are just that – displays – and not little menus that let you change the settings they display. Of course this could be a mild one-off annoyance (but an annoyance still, let me be clear about that) as you can simply turn said information bar off. Unfortunately that setting doesn't stick... so count my bug report in. Update: I've been told that they'll sort this out asap within minutes of reporting the bug. Impressive.
Other things that I had expected to see done more smoothly in the second revision are:
- A 'Mode' menu with two entries, one of which is a submenu. WTF? Why not put this into the 'View' menu? Or put the submenu's contents into the main menu? Are we going to see more comprehensive modes as in Alpha or emacs?
- Better iChat integration. Now I could have two open windows for contacts in each of iChat and in SEE. Why copy iChat's bad design here? And why not tie in better with iChat (OK, I don't know to which extent this can be done). I'd like to drag the shared document 'proxy' icon right onto a contact in iChat.
- And then there are more ways to not use regular expressions than I can count. They even get a menu of their own. Shouldn't that be in or at least next to the 'Edit' menu?
A final remark I want to make is that these days there seems to be more good software from German speaking countries these days. There has always been GraphicConverter, but now there's also LaunchBar from Austria, SEE, Cyberduck from Switzerland and a few more – like our very own, say. This has the advantage that applications are more likely to come with a decent localisation. Sadly, SEE doesn't.
