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Programming Businesses Apple IT Technology

Pepper Author Calls It Quits 98

Posted by pudge from the for-now-anyway dept.
gruber writes "Maarten Hekkelman, author of the cross-platform text editor Pepper, has thrown in the towel. He announced last week that he's discontinuing Pepper. He agreed to an interview with me, on topics ranging from the state of Mac OS X to the difficulties of cross-platform development." It's quite an interesting read, even if he does currently prefer Windows XP over Mac OS X and Linux.
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Pepper Author Calls It Quits More

Pepper Author Calls It Quits

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  • Tucows (Score:4, Interesting)

    by perlyking ( 198166 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2002 @12:50PM (#4189671) Homepage
    The most interesting thing about the article for me is that Tucows let you buy a higher rating!
    • It's true. I also am a developer of cross-platform software who has submitted to Tucow's review process. The interesting thing was that they had a different reviewer for each OS my software runs on, and each reviewer gave drastically different reviews. If I can find the results I'll post them.

      Anyways, the feeling that I got from the Windows reviewers is that they are incredibly biased against anything cross platform and especially programs written in Java. This isn't just sour grapes either. They penalized me for all sorts of contrived shortcomings (including "it's not built with Visual Studio") and then topped it off with the comment "people won't need this software".

      I've since decided to forget about Tucows listings. A while ago they threatend to delist me 'cause I didn't update my listing after a new release. I ignored them and now, interestingly enough, they've been updating my listings for me.

      And sales are just fine, thank you.

  • While BBEdit is my edito of choice, it is very sad to see Pepper go, I used it before bbedit came out for OS X and it was great. Very full featured and well devloped. It was stable even under Public Beta. I hope Maarten rethinks this decision in the future and starts development on it again, but until then, thanks Maarten!
    • I hope Maarten rethinks this decision in the future and starts development on it again, but until then, thanks Maarten!

      He could at least be a nice guy about it and release his old code as abandonware. A lot of us did go beyond simply rooting for his product and actually bought it. (And a lot more would have, if he had refined it a little more).

      From the tone of the interview, it sounds like he just wants to take his ball and go home.

      • Good point. I owned (I guess I should say I still sort of do) Pe on BeOS. I was, let's say, annoyed when he first dropped that one. Hey, I understand that there was a limited market once BeOS shop went kaput, yet there were quite a few users out there already.

        In a way the interview has left me with a bit of a whinie aftertaste -- looks like things did not work out for him and but he would not want to admit that this was not (entirely) the fault of Be, Apple or users not rushing from BBedit to Pepper...
      • He could at least be a nice guy about it and release his old code as abandonware.

        http://www.beunited.org/

  • so? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Inominate ( 412637 )
    Another programmer gets burned out on thier project, big deal. Is the editor in widespread use? A quick search on google doesnt yield anything obvious.

    Just another case of a programmer fed up with thier project, angry that he's not making enough money on it. Doesn't look like he's willing to opensource his code either.

    Screw him.

    • Re:so? (Score:2)

      by pudge ( 3605 )
      I didn't post it because of Pepper itself, but because of what the developer had to say. I personally think he has an interesting perspective, and I think others would agree. Perhaps the article title should have been different in light of that; c'est la vie.
    • And what have you been doing that is so much better?
      Hmm, trolling /. seems like a much better project.

      What was that about judging others?
      And screw you too.

  • Can't get too excited about this.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday September 03, 2002 @01:04PM (#4189768) Journal
    He's an old Be guy who doesn't like OS X. Mac users found his app buggy and saw no reason to switch from the beloved BBEdit. (He agrees that no one took much interest in it.) And Linux users, who won't pay for anything, certainly wouldn't pay for a new text editor.

    Like someone else said, the most interesting factoid was that you can buy rating stars on Tucows. Also, I had to laugh at:

    I had hoped that with the new popularity of Linux and FreeBSD there might be more and more users coming from Mac OS or Windows who would like to use a more comfortable editor.

    But I was wrong. I sold three copies and one of those three was a fraud. I did have thousands of downloads though.

    I think this guy is crying out to be a Qt developer....

  • I found the sections on Cocoa to be intresting. From some general reading on the topic, it looks like more hobby developers are embracing Cocoa for their development, yet the commercial developers keep moving away from it. Another developer scraps his Mac version of the program because development for OS X requires buying too much into the Jobs way of thinking. I do hope that someone at Apple sees this and really pushes for moving back towards C++ instead of Cocoa.
    • Most people who have used both Objective C and C++ agree that Objective C is the far better language. Microsoft is based on giving the customers what they think they want; Apple is based on building thing the right way. Microsoft doesn't have an ideology or a unified theory of design, Apple does. Apple wouldn't be Apple if they choose the inferior language because it was more popular.
      • Most people who have used both Objective C and C++ agree that Objective C is the far better language.

        What makes ObjC a better language? Is it because there are less compile time restrictions or because you can manipulate classes without making things ugly? Almost all Software Engineers agree that most of the software development process can/should be automated. Why let the error prone human do something when a machine could do it with a high rate of success. That's why almost all manufacturing is done by machine today. Why should the computer be any different.

        Microsoft is based on giving the customers what they think they want; Apple is based on building thing the right way.

        In this case, wouldn't making a computer work better be the right thing? The joy of owning an Apple was that they didn't crash. They didn't stop someone from doing their work. The computer just worked. This includes software developed by third parties and Apple included. C++ is going to allow engineers to develop software that doesn't depend on run time conditions, but more on compile time conditions. If the program compiles, we know that all methods exist in the classes. Using references, we know that care was taken to ensure memory cleanup. The STL provides a high degree of cross platform (and cross vendor) choices in algorithms. All good things that, IMHO, would lead to the right way.
        • What makes ObjC a better language?


          Primarily, a dynamic runtime. Want to know if an object implements a method? Ask it with -respondsToSelector:. Want to get a class object given its name? NSClassFromString(). Want to set a property of an object, when both the property name and value are determined at runtime? Use -takeValue:forKey:. C++ has none of these capabilities (at least last time I checked), and they are very useful in a variety of areas.


          Almost all Software Engineers agree that most of the software development process can/should be automated.


          Which is another argument for Objective-C, since programs using it tend to be much shorter than C++ programs. The line you don't have to write doesn't have a bug.


          C++ is going to allow engineers to develop software that doesn't depend on run time conditions, but more on compile time conditions.


          And you can write static code in ObjC if you want to. But in C++ as soon as you want dynamic behavior, you end up writing tons of code (and therefore bugs) to reproduce the features that more dynamic languages give you for free.

        • What makes ObjC a better language? Is it because there are less compile time restrictions or because you can manipulate classes without making things ugly?

          Well first off let me state that I'm not qualified to answer. While I know C++ I don't know Objective C; further my programming for last 5 years has mostly been in Perl and print stream languages. Other than by accident I've had nothing to do with ObjC, not because I don't like it but because I never need to work in that low of a language for anything I do.

          Here is what Apple says on the issue

          ####Start Apple Quote

          Moreover, Objective-C is a simple language. Its syntax is small, unambiguous, and easy to learn. Object-oriented programming, with its self-conscious terminology and emphasis on abstract design, often presents a steep learning curve to new recruits. A well-organized language like Objective-C can make becoming a proficient object-oriented programmer that much less difficult. The size of this book is a testament to the simplicity of Objective-C. It's not a big book.

          Compared to other object oriented languages based on C, Objective-C is very dynamic. The compiler preserves a great deal of information about the objects themselves for use at runtime. Decisions that otherwise might be made at compile time can be postponed until the program is running. This gives Objective-C programs unusual flexibility and power. For example, Objective-C's dynamism yields two big benefits that are hard to get with other nominally object-oriented languages:

          • Objective-C supports an open style of dynamic binding, a style than can accommodate a simple architecture for interactive user interfaces. Messages are not necessarily constrained by either the class of the receiver or the method selector, so a software framework can allow for user choices at runtime and permit developers freedom of expression in their design. (Terminology like "dynamic binding," "message," "class," "receiver," and "selector" will be explained in due course in this book.)

          • Objective-C's dynamism enables the construction of sophisticated development tools. An interface to the runtime system provides access to information about running applications, so it's possible to develop tools that monitor, intervene, and reveal the underlying structure and activity of Objective-C applications.

          #### End Apple Quote

          Almost all Software Engineers agree that most of the software development process can/should be automated. Why let the error prone human do something when a machine could do it with a high rate of success. That's why almost all manufacturing is done by machine today. Why should the computer be any different.

          I tend to agree. I'm not sure how that argues for C++ which is appears to be somewhat lower level. Certainly the extremely dynamic typing of Perl is something I make use of very heavily.

          C++ is going to allow engineers to develop software that doesn't depend on run time conditions, but more on compile time conditions.

          That's true. But OTOH I'm not sure how that helps quality. Again consider Perl; certainly Perl depends a great deal on run time conditions. But on the whole the extra simplicity of the code means that simple programs seem to work better IMHO (again I'm moving away from ObjC due to ignorance on my part).

          If the program compiles, we know that all methods exist in the classes.

          That's really easy to check with any kind of "lint" like checker. I doubt Objective C code tends to ship with missing classes (except those linking into libraries they expect to be present).

          • In my almost 15 years of professional software development, from Basic and Fortran on up to Java and Objective C, the number one impactor of quality of code is memory management. Closely followed by error handling.

            ObjC and Java have exceptions, and unfortunately exceptions doesn't completely solve the "recovery from all errors well" path... but Cocoa does even better than java in that many things that can happen (such as calling a method on an ojbect that doesn't exist) which cause a java program to crash with an exception are thrown on ObjC but the program keeps running. They become more like warnings-- which has been great in my experience.

            But the number one thing is memory management. In C and C++ it just plane sucks. Its a little better with C++, but in my timeline it wasn't "fixed" until Java. Java does it right, but the GC threads can cause issues if performance consistancy is important.

            ObjectiveC does it really right-- you can defer freeing of memory when you want, and you can control it explicitly when you want and it all works rather well. The first C style language I've ever worked with where memory wasn't the biggest issue. (And I'm not talking about my code,but the code of all the programmers I've worked with over the years-- even guys who felt they were experts in C or C++ wrote code that cause memory bugs)

            Objective C gets memory management right and it does so without being over-bearing about it.

            I was dreading going to ObjC from Java, but I have been very pleasently surprised. I can say with confidence that you will write better code and have fewer bugs writing with ObjectiveC than with C++.

            Its worth getting "Building cocoa apps" from Orielly and working thru it.

    • While it is not a complete C++ solution, Apple has been persistently working on improving ObjC++ support. With ObjC++ all your GUI code still has to be in ObjC, but your business logic can stay in C++. Since GUI code is platform specific anyway having to use some ObjC should not be that objectionable to non-zealots. Every release it has better support, so obviously Apple knows that this is a priority with some customers. Plus Carbon is still around. If the Pepper guy didn't want to write reentrant code, well, that is a bummer, but the more reentrant code in the world, the better thread support will be, and the faster Mac OS X will be.
      • Apple has been persistently working on improving ObjC++ support.

        If you wouldn't have posted this comment, I don't think I would have known that ObjC++ existed. Even when I try to lookup classes in the CoreFramework (like XML parsing classes) I often times find incomplete or out of date material. While I'm a supported of C++, I wish Apple would get the documentation together so more developers could trust it.
    • God, I hope not. IMHO, C++ is just overkill for most of the native development on OS X. Then again, I am not a C++ fan.

      Anyway, if the issue is Cocoa, then Apple would have to provide C++ Cocoa APIs, instead of Objective-C. That is, the language linkage would have to change, but the core API would be the same, so C++ wouldn't give you a win in this case.

      Anyway, you still can code in C++ on OS X -- it's still gcc. The APIs are not C++ friendly, though, so you are limited to basic stuff, or recreating chunks of the Application Framework in C++ yourself.

      I don't know about how Steve Jobs thinks, but the Cocoa APIs are pretty solid Model-View-Controller stuff -- pretty venerable and proven object technology.

      • God, I hope not. IMHO, C++ is just overkill for most of the native development on OS X. Then again, I am not a C++ fan.

        I respect the fact that other people would rather use another programming language where I would pick C++. Truth be told, C++ is one of the best languages for writing cross platform, platform specific code (I dislike the JFC/Swing idea that everyone is forced into a single look and feel). If I had to choose a language for Mac only development, I would probably select ObjC.

        Anyway, if the issue is Cocoa, then Apple would have to provide C++ Cocoa APIs, instead of Objective-C.

        That's what I am looking and trying to build support for. Like the .Net WinForm API, you can write APIs for many different languages that all do roughly the same thing. There are a number of individual works, like Coplan's Advanced C++, that work through the issues of making C++ more run time based than it currently is.

        I don't know about how Steve Jobs thinks, but the Cocoa APIs are pretty solid Model-View-Controller stuff -- pretty venerable and proven object technology.

        Of course. Anyone who attempt cross platform development really needs MVC, but ObjC doesn't provide the MVC, the design of the Cocoa libraries provide the MVC nature of the program.

    • That would be exactly the wrong thing to do. Commercial software vendors are not using cocoa right now because they need to get their OS 9 apps running under OS X without re-writing from scratch. The path to do that quickly is Carbon and it works pretty well.

      Cocoa is excellent for commercial and hobby projects. Apple will not abandon it and go to C++-- believe me, the very suggestion would be laughed at by the NeXT people. Objective -C with Cocoa is far superior to C++ and actually, any of the other frameworks I've worked with in the past. Even though I've just learned ObjectiveC and the cocoa frameworks in the past 2 months, I'm already more productive with them than I have been in the past with Java (and Java was far more productive than C++ at getting things done-- ESPECIALLY UI Code which is very difficult in the C/C++ way of doing things.) Cocoa is a breeze.

      Its clear you haven't used it. IF you're a developer, I suggest you check it out and see how nice it is. If its your first framework you may not see what the big deal is, but if you've had to write event handlers under OS 9, or even Java, you'll see how nice it is. (And if you're a java fan you get all the power and glory and can stay in java space... though I chose to learn Objective C and made the language switch.)

      Its funny to say the "jobs way of thinking"-- I doubt jobs thinking had anything to do with cocoa, except that he markets it pretty well.

      I don't see anything limiting about it, at the worst you have to use carbon to access stuff, but that's the previous status quo.

      I'm aware of no commercial cocoa developers who have left and gone to carbon. I think you're wrong there. Omnigroup, Stone Design, and all the cocoa commercial houses continue to be fans of it and on the developer lists there is grousing about things that could be improved, but nobody saying "I'm going back to carbon". I think you're mistaking companies like adobe using carbon to port their (carbon) apps to OS X. Future apps will likely be in cocoa from these companies.

  • For those of you that can't be bothered to read the article, the reason this cross-platform editor is listed under Apple is because it has been there the longest after coming from BeOS.

    I find it interesting that the author thinks that Tucows has a lot of power. I never go there for software. I use Google and sometimes go to CNet or ZD-Net(Which recently appears to be essentially the same thing..since CNET bought it)
    • I find it interesting that the author thinks that Tucows has a lot of power. I never go there for software. I use Google and sometimes go to CNet or ZD-Net
      I'm suprised Tucows has any following at all, given how difficult it is to navigate through their libraries. But their web presence is huge, so they must have a significant following.

      Sure Google works well if you're trying to find software. But if you have a new product in an established category (like text editors), you're invisible in Google until you achieve something like critical mass. So you need to get noticed.

  • Maybe I don't understand something about Cocoa. But I had been under the imporession that, contrary to making it harder, writing your Mac applications in Cocoa would actually make them much easier to port. After all, Cocoa pretty much requires the use of either Java, which is obviously portable, or Objective C, which is portable via GnuStep.

    If this guy was rewriting frameworks anyway, why not rewrite the app in Obj-C, and help work on the GnuStep project? Then we could all use the best API of all, and it would be painless to port Pepper to any platform. Instead, he was fixated to the idea of using proprietary APIs instead of the proprietary but very well documented Cocoa API, and the porting challenges proved so hard that he had to give up.

    • I'm curious why you think writing the app in Cocoa would make it more portable. Cocoa is an Apple only thing. Even if you write the app in Java and use Cocoa the app will not run on Windows, or any other platform. It would require the Cocoa libraries to be present to make it work.

      Now I have to admit that I'm not up to date on the GnuStep project, but last I heard there was still a lot of work to be done. The other thing is I think GnuStep is a *nix thing. Although OpenStep used to run on Windows I don't think GnuStep does, although I could be wrong, and wouldn't mind finding out that I'm wrong.

      So, I don't think going back to scratch with Cocoa would be a reasonable option for this author. Most of his source base was in C++, and it would be a question of how much of that he could use in his Cocoa app, as to whether it would be worth it.

      Mark

      • You are right. GNUStep uses X and X uses Unix.... I should mention though since this is an OSX forum that GNUStep's window manager (Window Maker) will feel great to most OSX users. Its much faster than the heavy window managers and since its based on Next the learning curve will be shallow.

      • I'm just learning Cocoa, but I do believe that you can write a majority of your code in C++ if you want to. The interface would have to be written in something else (i assume Obj-C or by using Interface Builder), but you can write core components in C++. And as someone else already pointed out, you would probably need to rewrite the interface code anyways, so its not a big deal to rewrite it for each platform.

  • I hate to say it, but we may be seeing "Application Darwinism" at work here.

    I've been on the lookout for a fast cheap text (only) editor to do HTML development with, on OS X. Many of the apps I've tried are just too clunky for me to consider paying anything for them. I eventually went back to VIM [vim.org], even though it lacks some basic Mac functionality (i.e., it isn't a true document-based app). Since my LCD for a text editor is vi, this isn't so much of a hardship. I don't suggest everyone run out and use it on a daily basis. It work for me, but as they say: "Closed course. Professional driver".

    I took a look at Pepper for a day or two, and I found it a very odd app. It seemed to operate contrary to some OS X usage expectations, and it rendered any typeface I chose terribly. The interface just felt all wrong to me. It crashed enough that I simply considered it "beta" and moved on.

    I have similar complaints about the much beloved (but not by me) BBEdit.

    I'm not saying that any of these editors are necessarily bad. If you like it, by all means, use it. However, I don't think all the comments about Pepper on Version Tracker [versiontracker.com] are necessarily spurious. It seems that Pepper didn't quite cut it for other OS X users, as well.

    Having less variety of apps available to OS X is sad, and some people will probably miss Pepper (even if they didn't pay for it), but I can't help but think that if it was a little more of a killer app, it would have survived.

    • Have you tried Pagespinner from Optima Systems? I have used it with BBEdit and GoLive to build sites. http://www.optima-system.com/pagespinner/
    • I fully agree about the "Darwinism" comment. Not only application darwinism but also (mostly?) programmer Darwinism.

      Basically this guy can't code a thread-safe app, doesn't understand the OS X history (hint: 10.2 lineage doesn't make its kernel "old"), can't code a debugger without /proc (hint: a lot of debuggers do without /proc), doesn't grok Cocoa, thinks that Powerplant is superior to Cocoa and C++ to Obj-C, etc.

      I haven't used Pepper, but from the interview I'm glad I never had the opportunity.
    • I highly recommend mi [asahi-net.or.jp] for anyone who's looking for a text editor for coding purposes. It's got customizable syntax coloring, FTP (better than BBE's), integration with shell scripts, and all kinds of goodies. And it's free (as in beer).
    • When I was using OS X, I looked high and low for an editor with tag autocomplete and syntax coloring, like Homesite on Windows. Never found anything as good as Homesite.
  • "I'm aware there are compatibility problems between this version and MacOS X 10.2 aka Jaguar. There are a few solutions for this, you can downgrade to Pepper 3.6.6b (which only works if you bought a 3.x version initially instead of a 4.x version). Another solution might be to throw away the current preferences (make sure you keep a copy of your serial number somewhere before you do)."

    And people paid money for this garbage.
  • I think he's had some bad experiences in the shareware world recently, and it's affected his outlook. I mean, what else could make a Mac developer say this, "Windows is like heaven to a programmer. There are so many tools to chose from and the documentation is wonderful. I think the API's are on average very good.

    Oh man, it sounds he hasn't been in the Windows environment very long, does it?

    • Re:Bitter and Twisted (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Say what you want about Microsoft and Bill Gates and all that, but MSDN does in fact fall all over itself to give you everything you could possibly want when developing. Tons of cds full of documents, example code, tools, resources, etc. MSDN *want* you to write lots of programs. More programs means more things people want Windows for.

      Sure, Apple does that too, but it's also possible that he started on the Windows side of programming. Anyone who's coded a lot for one platform can attest that you get 'familiar' with the way that OS works inside. Then when you start doing things for other platforms you always end up re-interpreting the question "Given that I want to do (X) and I know how to do it on OS (Y) how do I do the same thing on OS (Z)?" (I always used to do this with Str255 types on the classic MacOS, thinking of everything in terms of C strings and then having to 'fix' everything to be Str255's). If you've done a lot of Qt work, Cocoa looks pretty weird. If you've done a lot of MFC work, just about everything looks weird. I know people who are MFC geniuses though, and I wish I could work with MFC the way they can. It's not just they program in it, it's like they manage to move their internal brain operations to think exactly like MFC does, so they know what MFC wants.

      (You may now make your obligatory MFC jokes, I gave you lots of good stuff to quote)

  • Maarten Hekkelman misunderstandings about Mac OS X (Score:5, Insightful)

    by @madeus ( 24818 ) <slashdot_24818@mac.com> on Tuesday September 03, 2002 @02:15PM (#4190298)
    Maarten Hekkelman doesn't like Mac OS X. He also doesn't seem to me to know much about it, nor does he seem to want to know much about it. He disliked the operating system offered on the platform on which it had developed a following, that is the simple reason why Pepper is no longer a viable option.

    To justify my statements, amongst other thing, he says:

    Mac OS X, however, loses on all fronts. It claims to be a Unix but it doesn't support much of the more advanced Unix features, since it is using such an old kernel.

    For someone who is writing a text editor to blame the limitations of the kernel of the operating system on which it runs for lack of functionality is simply looking for excuses and is, in reality, a case of barking up the wrong tree (though he does mention a reference to a very old misfeature with regard 'piping', though there are/were very easy other ways to do the very same thing).

    Though not exclusively based on FreeBSD 4.4, MacOS X 10.2 is based very heavily around a FreeBSD 4.4 core and, of course, GCC 3.1. Neither of these are 'old' by any practical definition.

    Though the kernel has a certain level of maturity, the Mach layer currently acts primarily only as an abstraction layer for developers and has been very heavily hacked at since it's use in NeXT. The kernel is not 'old' nor 'krufty', despite the distinct impression given.

    Maarten Hekkelman also says:

    Did you ever consider dropping support for the old Mac OS, and making Pepper only for Mac OS X?

    No.


    I can understand not wanting to be locked in to Coca, but refusing to drop OS 9 (at the very least apart from bug fixes) was a mistake. More effort should have been spent on the Mac OS X (and Windows) versions.

    Part of being a good developer is being able to make smart decisions. To keep supporting an out-dated operating system when it is clear that are other badly needed new features that need to be addressed (features needed to keep the product viable) is foolish.

    Though I don't know him, the fact that he has now left development and gone to 'Database Administrator' speaks volumes to me about his ability to strategically plan product development, and his proficiency as a developer. I don't like to be critical of someone I haven't met, but that is the distinct impression I get.

    I fail to see why a truly good developer would want to do this, as database administration is tedious at best and mind numbing at worse (and 1.5 TB systems are really not that interesting quite frankly, a Network Appliance Filer installation will do the job for you and is easily maintained part time by any administrator, with multiple redundant disks, multiple network connections, multiple power supplies, multiple controllers, the ability to roll back to previous versions (snapshots) and the ability to use Snap Mirror to keep a up-to-date version running off site which you can simply switch over to if the system goes FUBAR - makes it a no-brainer of a solution). I should point out, in the interest of fairness that they are not the only ones that make such a product (there are many cheaper competitors more suitable for smaller scale installations), but theirs is the best IME ;-)

    Another thing I find telling is that he seems to dislike and find it hard to adjust to many things in Mac OS X and to dislike them quite passionately. I personally dislike little in most operating systems, other than crashes. IMO true hackers (as-in-the-coder-sence-of-the-word) never find it difficult to adjust and I have always believed this ability it to be innate in good hackers.

    For example, I have never sat in front of something like Project Builder and bemoaned it's single window behavior (as Maarten Hekkelman does in this interview), I found it quite intuitive. I found it equally intuitive to have multiple windows, I've never had a problem with either. I also have no major problems with the Dock or with the Windows taskbar.

    Of course I expect *users* to get confused over this sort of thing, but not developers!

    • Maarten Hekkelman doesn't like Mac OS X.

      No surprise there. He's an old Be bigot, and Apple's decision to buy NeXT instead of Be is probably the #1 reason why his favorite operating system is dead and gone. Nobody hates OS X with greater blind passion than a hard-core Be fan.

      Whatever Avi Tevanian and/or Steve Jobs does over the next 10 years, for any company, I guarantee that this guy will hate it.

      If you asked an Amiga or Atari user what he thought about Macintosh System 7 back in 1987 or so, the shrill of his whines would have been at about the same pitch.

      Oddly enough, when an unpopular OS dies, the former users never seem to blame the most popular OS for killing it (Windows), but instead lay the corpse at the feet of the #2 player (Apple). Probably because these also-ran companies (Commodore, Atari, Be), having failed to get traction with general users, tried to shoulder their way into niche markets that Apple is known for (media, music production, publishing, etc.) and rapidly went out of business in the attempt. Just a theory, anyway.

      • Re:Maarten Hekkelman misunderstandings about Mac O (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I'm a Be biggot.

        I also just spent several thousand dollars buying into Apple a few months ago. I love Mac OS X.

        I used Pe, and it was good. Marteen, is a good programmer. He fucked up and wrote it for carbon. Big mistake.
        • No, that would make you a "former Be user, who liked it a lot". The Be bigots would see you as somewhat of a traitor, or at least Part Of The Problem.

          For the record, I also thought Pe/Pepper had a lot of promise to it. It's kind of too bad he's decided to kill it without allowing the Open Source community pick at the remains. Not that he owes anything to Open Source folks, but all the customers who he had over the years would at least have somewhere to turn now.

      • When Atari Corp. died, I knew exactly where to lay the blame -- at the feet of the Tramiels, for driving the company into the dirt.

        Apple had nothing to do with it.

    • For someone who is writing a text editor to blame the limitations of the kernel of the operating system on which it runs for lack of functionality is simply looking for excuses and is, in reality, a case of barking up the wrong tree (though he does mention a reference to a very old misfeature with regard 'piping', though there are/were very easy other ways to do the very same thing).

      Application programmers run into kernel limitations all the time. You should take a look at all the features offered by solaris to see what can be put in there.

      Though I don't know him, the fact that he has now left development and gone to 'Database Administrator' speaks volumes to me about his ability to strategically plan product development, and his proficiency as a developer. I don't like to be critical of someone I haven't met, but that is the distinct impression I get.

      As he has noted, the hasn't abandoned software development altogether and has a lot of free time which he can use to develop software.

  • Did you expect Pepper to be successful on Linux? Was it?

    I had hoped that with the new popularity of Linux and FreeBSD there might be more and more users coming from Mac OS or Windows who would like to use a more comfortable editor.

    But I was wrong. I sold three copies and one of those three was a fraud. I did have thousands of downloads though.

    Wow, that's unfortunate. But I can't say I'm surprised -- the only commercial Linux software that seems to sell are things like 3D rendering and animation software -- packages that cost many thousands of dollars.

    I am afraid that will be the future of the entire software industry. Eventually it will only be possible to sell huge software packages with lots of support; all the small apps will be open source in the end.

    Is this a bad thing? While I too wouldn't have minded being a full-fledged programmer in time to get rich developing small apps such as file archival software or FOSSIL drivers, there is a great deal of support that comes from having every user of the open-source small apps be a beta tester and potentially a developer.

    I think it's less likely that Pepper was too small of an application to sell it in this brave new world than it is that Linux users just didn't hear about it or care. I don't mean this in a bad way - it takes a while for decent advertising to work, but how many people are defecting from Mac to Linux?

    That's part of what aggravates me about many commercial developers peddling their wares on Linux... they don't take the situation seriously enough going in and they badmouth the whole situation on the way out. It's still a niche market. There are something like 10% of the users of Windows (similar to Mac numbers, but with fewer workstations/desktops in the mix), and a bounty of applications each of which does about 80% of what one wants and each in a different way, but all without costing a cent. So, in general, commercial products come to us by companies that understand only the needs of Windows users, with less/no support, less stability, and higher price tags.

    In his case, it sounds like he was one of the few that was being fairly reasonable about all of the above points, and I would have seriously thought about buying his product, but I've never heard of it. Now that I have, he's pulled out already. Sorry.

  • bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch


    People said it was slow because of the cross-platform nature. It was slow because of buggy code.


    bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch


    Mac OS X is slow


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    BBEdit is too well like by mac users. And even though have been out for years longer than me (and are the pre-eminant Mac editor), they stole ideas from me.


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    tucows suck and I tried to buy my way on.


    bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch


    Tucows wouldn't let me buy my rating and they wouldn't give me my bribe back,


    bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch


    I like windows and their APIs. This also show my intelligence.


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  • XEmacs??? BBEdit??? (Score:2, Informative)

    by GreenKiwi ( 221281 )
    If you want a good free text editor, get xemacs/emacs!

    If you want to pay for an excellent editor, get BBEdit!

    'Nuf said!
  • Let me start by saying, I downloaded pepper in the past; Cute little editor, a few nice features, but thirty-frickin-dollars?!?! Oh right, it was 'shareware'. Although it was completely unusable in it's free version (every 3 saves or so a dialog box would come up, making you wait 5 seconds then click on a button. Utterly destroyed any flow to you're writing, especially if you save often.)

    Interviewer: Let's start with the news. According to your web site (http://www.hekkelman.com/), you are no longer taking orders for Pepper, the text editor you've been working on for several years. In fact, it is no longer even available for download, except for registered users.

    I think it's fairly telling that when he abandoned pepper, rather then making it free (as in beer and/or as in speech), he simply yanks it away. (Fine, if you're not going to play my way, I'm taking my ball and going home)

    Maarten Hekkelman: Yup. Too bad. I had a couple of cool features in Pepper for Linux/FreeBSD but couldn't port them to Mac OS X since the kernel did not support them.

    Right... features you couldn't include in you text editor because the kernel didn't support them.

    Really, the interviewer has it right on, For one thing, anyone who runs Linux or BSD on their desktop and has the need for a good text editor is almost certain to be a hardcore, incorrigible user of either Emacs or vi.. The same apply to OS X. If you're serious enough about text editing to pay for a text editor (such as pepper), why not just go all the way and learn vi or emacs?


    • It's his right, its his code to keep it when he stops selling it. There's nothing "telling" about that, unless you think that people should be forced to give up their property because it fits your ideology. (eg: Stallmanism/Communism).

      Hell, from what it sounds like, not giving the source away probably saved the world a lot of trouble.

      I apologize if I misunderstood you and you were talking about the fact that his customers deserve better support. But I disagree with you if you were saying that all code should be given away if its not being sold.

      Its my intention to open source my code when it becomes 5 years old... if the news stuff isn't innovative enough and compelling enough that opening the olds stuff hurts sales, then that's a sad state of affairs. But the last person I will give code to willingly is the one who insists that it is his right to demand my code from me-- that I don't have the right to sell my code and choose when/where/how or if I open source it. (That man being richard stallman, et. al.)

      The pepper author doesn't "owe" us his source code-- unless we bought the product and are now screwed by lack of support. But then only those who paid money have right to ask for support.

      • ...but at the same time, Pepper was a damn nice editor, for a wide variety of reasons. While I suppose there is no moral imperative for him to open the code, it would still be A Really Nice Thing To Do, particularly if he doesn't intend on developing it any further or making any more money off of it.

        But it's his prerogative, I suppose. Still, it's a shame. He could have really helped advance the state of the art, given a few of his ideas. Or at the absolute least he could have handed off the code to someone else so that people who depend on the program (like me) could count on it still being actively developed.
  • It's too bad Maarten has stopped developing Pepper. I bought a license and have been a very happy user of his program since. The fact that his serial algorythm got cracked has something to do with him quitting? What you mean, you only got cracked ONCE?

    What you do is change the algorythm and change it to something stronger. And stop wasting your time on platforms nobody cares about, and focus on the platform that your users are on. You know, the ones that bring in the money?

    If he had put some more effort into Pepper 4 and charged an upgrade fee I would have purchased it instantly. For me, Pepper is the ultimate text-editor and I fear the moment when I upgrade to Jaguar, since that's when I'll have to install a different editor. What now? I need a small, fast and cheap (gui!) text editor!

    So much for one-person efforts I guess. A real shame.


    • It comes free with Jaguar. Its called TextEdit.

      Thing is there are so many free editors out there (at least four that come with jaguar-vi, emacs, TextEdit, project builder, hell you can make your own with 20 lines of cocoa code.) that commercial editors have a tough market. Either they charge real money and provide lots of features like BBEdit, or they go out of business.

      So, if TextEdit doesn't cut it, you probably should buy BBEdit.

      • It comes free with Jaguar. Its called TextEdit.

        While TextEdit does let you edit text (better than Word, for instance), it's not quite on the same playing field as any of the code editors such as BBEdit, Pepper, vi, or emacs. TextEdit is really just a SimpleText for Mac OS X*. The fact that the default setting for new documents is Rich Text Format is very telling (who wants to write code in Rich Text?).

        * (why don't doc-writers just save their stuff as PDFs and let people open them in Preview?)


        • You prefer vi or Emacs? Great you get those for free too.

          As for writing code, there's project builder, which has a very good code editor, on its way to being excellent. Also free. If you prefer vi or emacs then you can use them for you code, you can do all your development within emacs, for instance (building and debugging as well, I believe.)

          IF you like BBEdit, though, then get it, great. I'm just saying that its a tough market when Apple ships 4 editors with the OS, and BBEdit is there for those who want BBEdit like features.

        • why don't doc-writers just save their stuff as PDFs and let people open them in Preview?


          Because PDFs suck for reading on screen. The author doesn't know how big my monitor is or how much screen real estate I want to devote to his file, and having separate pages just gets in the way. Using HTML or RTF gives the user much more flexibility.

    • Only cracked once? Once is enough ;) Obviously no-one cared enough to do it again.
    • http://barebones.com/products.html

      BBEdit Lite, I think you will be quite pleased.

      Of course, if you want to go for the full out, $120 version ($80 for me :-), I think you will find it worth it if you do any serious editing. Personally, I love this text editor dearly.

      Your other option, of course, is xemacs.
  • And I simply don't like Cocoa and would never program in it, since it is a Mac-only technology and I don't like to be locked in.

    Cocoa = ObjectiveC + frameworks.

    • ObjectiveC = Apple's own (free beer) DevTools
    • ObjectiveC = NeXTStep dev kit.
    • ObjectiveC = GNUStep [gnustep.org]
    Ok, so the foundation and other frameworks are missing, but it's not fair to completely write off Cocoa as Mac-only as it's not entirely correct.

    IMHO, Cocoa is streets ahead of PowerPlant, and I've used both.

    And he tried to buy a bonus rating on Tucows. *ack!* I didn't know you could do that. Why not let the software stand on its own merit, instead of artificially pumping it up??

    It [redirection of pipes to a window] works in Mac OS X now (well, 10.1.x) but works much better and nicer on a real Unix using SVR3 style RPC calls.

    A real UNIX?? Them's fightin' words. Just 'coz he prefers SysV syscalls over BSD! Geez

    I had hoped to find new sources of income [porting to Windows].

    Congratulations. Welcome to the world of yet-another-text-editor-for-Windows ....

  • After reading the article I'm not entirely sure what the problem is. Did the timeline basically go:

    1. Shareware author writes yet another fucking editor.

    2. Nobody likes it.

    3. Tucows tells him to go stick it.

    4. Shareware author stops selling editor

    Is that it? What's the problem? Not enough free editors to choose from? You need to hand over money for buggy and unpopular editors as well?

    • Is that it? What's the problem? Not enough free editors to choose from? You need to hand over money for buggy and unpopular editors as well?

      The comments on cross platform software development were probably more relevant ;-)

  • No need to wait and have someone build it for you, if you are comfortable with Terminal.app. Directions on how to do it are HERE [members.shaw.ca]. In case you don't know what EMACS is, it's the great-grand-daddy text editor for programmers and propellerheads. It does everything but your laundry and makes BBedit/Pepper/Jedit/etc. look wimpy in comparison...
  • Y'know, this discussion thus far has pissed me off. Every time a software author decides to give up on a project people rip him down - usually without checking out the project. I respect Hekkelman for the amount of work that he put into Pe / Pepper - Enough so that Neal Stephenson used Pe to write his book "In the Beginning there was the Command Line" Not many shareware authors can say a book was written on their program.
  • That's funny.
    Move towards the light, Pepper....
  • Best quote from the article:
    My guess is that most serious Mac users care deeply about the quality of the interface of the software they use, especially things like being intuitive and having very good fit and finish. Most Windows users don't care about such things at all, and instead care more about the number of features.
    ... and i read somewhere (can't remember where) this week that the people who love OS X most tend to be converts from Linux/Unix, and the ones who hate it most tend to be OS9 users. The rationale is that Linux/Unix (and to some extent, Windows) users don't expect a polished, well-thought-out GUI and do expect to wrestle with the system for each hardware addition; for them a system like OS Xthat 'just works' it's the best thing ever. For OS9 users, that's the baseline.

    finally, best of luck to John Gruber, nice work on BBEdit, you're (still) a great source of info on the mailing lists. (and interesting new website too)
  • That would explain why the source for Pe for beos is now opensource.. apparently there is no sense in depraving the future of this code if its not going to live on in pepper. BeUnited.org has the news and cvs of the pe code so perhaps an opensource apple varient will spring up?
  • First off, Pepper is great and it's too bad it's going away.

    From the interview: "A huge amount of work that went into designing the ultimate GUI was thrown away and all we got back was a bag full of candy that was dog slow."

    Some of you know that I've been pretty vocal, complaining about how slow Mac OS X is. I've been called a liar and a troll. It's been implied that I must have had some configuration problem on the OS X machines I've used. I've been called stupid and ignorant.

    Yet here in the article, we have Maarten Hekkelman, a well respected developer, and even HE says OS X is slow. Is Maarten a troll, or is it just that OS X is slow, and no one wants to admit it?

  • Poor baby can't sell his shareware anymore. Boo hoo.

    It's a text editor dude, not a fricken app development studio. Like he said in the interview, in the future it may only be possible to sell big application suites, and not ream people out for a text editor. I can't say I see this as a big loss.

    That's what peeves me about MacOS vX and Windows.. everyone wants to make money with their programs. And Linux? People distribute good programs out of the kindness of their heart.

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