The soporific Allan Odgaard

One of the great innovations in the Mac software world has been Allan Odgaard’s Textmate text editor. In fact, I’m using it to compose this very entry.

It does about a million things to make typing text so much easier, integrated searches to Google and returning the “I’m feeling lucky” entry, automatically closing a "" pair, the list goes on and on.

But there are just so many features! To this problem, the Textmate crew turned an enterprising eye, they started making screencasts of “how to be effective in this application.” Genius, pure genius.

Many of the screencasts are done by Odgaard himself and his voice has a certain soporific quality to it. I can feel the gentle purring of the hard drives in his machine (charlie), I can hear the solid clicks of an ergonomic keyboard (what kind of keyboard is that, Allan?), the daintier clicks of a mouse, and the Danish-tinged accentation of English.

Now this is not to bring into question his command of English, for it is truly superb, it’s just his narration, his friendly and calming timbre that makes me want to ponder the slow peace of carbon monoxide poisioning….zzzzzzz

I kid you not, in a 10 minute screencast I found myself out by minute 7. One wouldn’t think it possible.

Textmate