[TxMt] Re: TM2

[Ray Slakinski]

Just dont fall into the same trap Duke Nukem Forever fell into, always changing and doing something better and cooler only to find out that it isn't cool anymore after all that work and you change it all again. Its better to have a Textmate 2 then 3 then 4 then nothing at all. I love TM that I have, but I would be lying if I didn't say I didn't poke around the other editors whenever a ugly bug rears its head and pisses me off.

Ray Slakinski

On 2010-05-28, at 9:58 AM, Allan Odgaard wrote:

> On 29 Apr 2010, at 22:28, Tim Harper wrote:
> 
>> […] Things have been awfully quiet about TM2 for the last several months. You've claimed you are still working on it, but I've just about lost hope. There are no signs to reinforce my faith that TM2 will ever become a reality.
> 
> This is understandable, and while I do feel bad about the situation overall, I dislike speaking about 2.0 — it’s a mix of many things, some I have previously mentioned, like not wanting to talk about a product which is partly just my wishful thinking of what I want the end product to be, another is that my motivation and optimism is anything but constant, sometimes I think that if I work really hard for two months, I have enough to release an alpha, yet there tend to be some stumbling block, something I estimated to just a day’s work (or didn’t consider at all) end up taking the two full months, so it seems I have made no progress at all after those two months (sometimes it may even go backwards because structural changes disable certain features), and someone will then ask about that alpha I was so optimistic about, which will make me think it is all hopeless…
> 
> So while the situation does bother me, I am content with people thinking 2.0 is vaporware and may never happen, because I don’t want to do posts of the day/week/month, as these will just be a reflection of my mood that day, which is anything but constant.
> 
> Pretty much everything I’ve said about 2.0, I have later regret. I wish I would have had the foresight to hire someone to have continued working on 1.x so I could quietly work on 2.0 — one may argue that this is not too late, but there is a better chance of me open sourcing 2.0 than going back to 1.x. 2.0 currently has bad performance, lacks a lot of surface polish, has very few features people expect 2.0 to have, but it is a very solid code base which has good abstractions, most of the hard work has been done, and is geared heavily toward many years of future improvements/extensions/features.
> 
> So… 2.0 could go alpha but would go through same mocking and ridicule that 1.0 went through — with the letter I got from Aaron Swartz, it is something I am considering, but it will be pretty hard on me, and double-so because there are so many obvious shortcomings but I am still working from my own roadmap, so I wouldn’t really want any feedback, I mean, it’s like if you build a house, you don’t want strangers to come by and tell you that you need to put in a missing window while you are busy nailing the floor — so alpha release would solely be for users, but for most users 1.5 is probably still the better choice, but I will re-evaluate when the stories for the next three iterations have been completed (Pivotal Tracker speak), as these are the most glaring defects.
> 
>> […] I can't help but wonder if your promise of "free upgrades" has blasted a crater in your motivation to work on TM2. Is there a possibility of this, Allan?
> 
> Free upgrade surely was a mistake ;) But I tend to find motivation in other things than money, so it hasn’t really affected the timeline.
> 
>> […]
>> * State that TM3 will be released with those features, and will be a paid
>> upgrade for everyone.
> 
> It will probably have to be the 2.1 release which will have to make up for the money I left on the table with that “free 2.0” promise ;)
> 
> 
> 
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