On 18 Mar 2005, at 10:59, Mark Smith wrote:
OK. I've declined to respond to a few of these already. So what follows is not intended as a specific response to Mats' levity above...
Well, since my levity 'made the cup runneth over' so to speak, I have to respond to Mark's points.
There is a great deal to praise about TextMate, Allan and the community, but do we need to sour it with continual jibes at Bare Bones ?
True praise generally comes from doing the right or good things. Jibes (= negative comments) generally comes from doing bad or the wrong things. Sometimes they are deserved, sometimes they are not.
I can't be bothered with this moronicity.
Hmm, I obviously must have missed some things that you've read Mark, as this "moronicity" has completely passed me by. I'll ignore the "moronicity" 'word' as a badly chosen word, rather than anything else. ;-)
Bare Bones Software is a dedicated Mac software developer with a very well earned standing in the community. As a long standing user of BBEdit and Mailsmith and a long standing subscriber to all of Bare Bones mailing lists, I can say that many of the policy jibes I've read here about Bare Bones are not true.
Yes, BB is (has been??) a respected Mac app developer. I've paid for and used BBEdit since '98/'99 including BBEdit 8.0.x, so I think I have an absolute right to express my views of the company/product.
Perhaps, you can point out just a few of the 'continual' jibes that are unjustified in your mind ??
That they don't listen to users, don't ever announce planned features and haven't added anything significant to their products in an age is bullshit.
Mark, I like the blending of several different aspect in that sentence. But let's address each point:
1. ...don't listen to users: As outsiders we can only hope that they listen to their users, but we can only see/judge their response to our own proposals.
As you can research on this list, I have been proposing a few ideas here and there (I try my best to keep them to a minimum :) ) and as a BBEdit user I have proposed as many or more to BB over the years, to not see a single thing end up in the app. Most of the things I suggested are present in TM, so they can't all have been bad!! (IF I feel bothered, and need to, I can probably trawl old CD's, e-mail backups for the e-mails to prove that !!)
To give you a simple and very telling example please read the following post: [ http://www.listsearch.com/BBEditTalk.lasso?id=17218 ] It's a simple proposal that I made publicly in September last year, and as far as I can see there has not been a single bit of that implemented anywhere in BBEdit. I - and others - have asked for far more from Allan (a single developer vs 4+ dev's) since September, and he has implemented, or is working on most of those requests/features. Most of which seem - in my layman's point-of-view - far more demanding than taking the existing Glossary palette window in BBEdit and adding it to the drawer, which is just one of my points. Please correct me if I'm wrong on that point anyone ??
2. ...don't ever announce planned features = bs Please show me where BB announces their planned features?? I've never seen that part before !!! And while you're at it, please show me where anyone on this list has complained about BB's lack of announcements ???
3. ...added anything significant... I can't recall anyone on this list ever saying that they haven't added anything significant, they obviously must have. However, these additions has never been to the true benefit of my work style and workflow, in contrast to Allan's improvements to TM.
TextMate is the best new mac only editor to arrive since BBEdit. TextMate kicks BBEdits ass in some ways. BBEdit kicks TextMate's ass in others. This will remain the case if we are lucky enough to continue to have two excellent editors on the platform.
Yes, the Mac (=OS X) has more editors than ever before, and most of them kick BBEdit's ass in so many different areas. Something we should be happy and grateful for.
However, the single important point to focus on here though, is this one. (Business 101 coming up)
When you are successful, and/or the market leader in your niche market, it is way too easy to become big headed, complacent and so on. It is a problem that affects every single company/organisation/country eventually. It has affected Apple, M$, many countries/empires in history and countless more examples, so I'm not singling out BareBones here.
Just sit back, and ask yourself this very simple question, IF BBEdit was so damn good, and catered so well to every single need of its users, would there be a market for TM, skEdit, SubEthaEdit ???? Just mentioning three great and small apps that has started up since the release of OS X, all of them produced by much smaller companies/numbers of developers than BBEdit. Now IF all three of those new apps, can implement easy USER changeable syntax highlighting, on top of all the other work required to build a editor, then why the hell can't BB do that ?? Are BB incompetent ?? No, either they have not been bothered, or alternatively, just focused on the wrong type of things !!!
Another point. The next time an app crashes, copy the CrashLog and paste it into new TM & BBEdit doc's and then begin typing some extra text into the top of the doc. TM handles this without problems, BBEdit is barely usable with serious lag time. (Using iMac G5 with 1.25 GB RAM)
There you have just two simple examples. Do I wish for BB to disappear ??? No, I want them to wake up, smell the coffee and start working to keep Allan and other developers on top form. That's what's good for all of us, and that's what is good for OS X as a platform.
Can we drop this now and focus on TextMate ? (That's how it works on the BBEdit lists.)
In my opinion the focus has always and exclusively been on TM, and never ever on any other app. The only times some other app - like BBEdit - has been mentioned, is in a qualified reference/point. If that statement is wrong, I trust that I will be corrected real soon.
Finally, in order to clarify things fully:
On 18 Mar 2005, at 10:29, Mats Persson wrote to Allan's comment:
Competition??? oh.. the rock stars over at BareBones ;)
Yeah, I heard about them once. They were pretty big around the time of The Beatles weren't they ?? Not seen much good come out of them lately ;-)
The above quote(s) was intended as light entertainment - also know as lame jokes (mine at least, not yours Allan). The big clue to that is the smilies at the end of the sentence. ;-)
Peace be with you all, and have a nice weekend away from the computers !
Kind regards,
Mats
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