Yesterday I remarked to my friend Mark (hmm.. that has a certain ring to it) that the features and capabilities of Macromates’ Textmate code editor are driving developers to the Macintosh platform. Textmate, like all good Mac software, leverages the extraordinary software architecture built into MacOS X, making applications more feature-rich, collaborative and communicative, simple to use and, importantly, cheap to build. Textmate retails for €39 (about $50 or £26).

Furthermore, you get MacOS X development tools for free, from Apple. They’re free to download and also contained in every MacOS X installation pack. If you use these tools, you get spell checking, for free. If you use Textmate, you get spell checking for free.

Now, let’s look at Microsoft Visual Studio. Buying the Standard Edition from Amazon will cost you £218. The Professional Edition £612 – that’s more expensive than a 17” iMac (which retails at £579 ex. VAT, and remember, you get the development tools for free).

Once you’ve got Visual Studio, then you can go and buy the spell checkers. For example: Keyoti StudioSpell ($50) or MailFrame’s CodeSpell ($29).