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Desktops (Apple) Programming Software Technology

The Old Guard of Mac Indy Apps Has Thrived For More Than 25 Years (macworld.com) 133

Glenn Fleishman, writing for MacWorld: It seems like it was only yesterday that I first used BareBones Software's BBEdit, but in actuality, yesterday is so far away -- 25 years, in fact. With all the twists and turns across more than two decades of Apple as a company, Mac hardware, and the underlying operating system, you might think that BBEdit stands alone as a continuously-developed app shepherded largely or exclusively by the same independent developer -- an app without a giant company behind it. As it turns out, BBEdit is one of several apps that's been around the block more than a few times.

The longevity of indie apps is more extraordinary when you consider the changes Apple put the Mac through from the early 1990s to 2018. Apple switched from Motorola 680x0 processors to PowerPC to Intel chips, from 32-bit to 64-bit code, and among supported coding languages. It revved System 7 to 8 to 9, then to Unix across now 15 major releases (from 10.0 to 10.14). That's a lot for any individual programmer or small company to cope with. Bare Bones's head honcho, Rich Siegel, and the developers behind three other long-running Mac software programs shared with me their insight on development histories for over 25 years, what's changed the most during that time, and any hidden treasures users haven't yet found.
You can hear more on BareBones Software's in this recent episode of The Talk Show, a podcast by DaringFireball's John Gruber.
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The Old Guard of Mac Indy Apps Has Thrived For More Than 25 Years

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @03:26PM (#57889248)

    We're not too far away from the 30th anniversary of NeXT.

    Apple should make a commemorative system for all NeXT fans.

    What's your wish list for the new NeXTCube?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The first Cubes actually came out in 1988, IIRC, so we're due for a 30th anniversary if this is correct. The refreshed Turbo systems came out in 91 or 93, I don't remember.

      Make a system with that same sexy case, keep the back plane design but build it around PCI-E.

      The original NeXT keyboards were exceedingly nice. Make modern USB versions with an "L-shaped" enter key.

      Oh, and don't charge me $1400.00 for a floppy drive, K thanks.

    • > Apple should make a commemorative system for all NeXT fans. What do you think osX is ?
    • What's your wish list for the new NeXTCube?

      Unfuck the Dock. The Dock was always an annoying use of screen real estate when it was at the side of a 4:3 ratio display. You really wanted it at the bottom. But then we moved to 16:9 ratio displays, where there's plenty of room at the side of the display, so what does Apple do? MOVE IT TO THE BOTTOM. Not just that, but when the Dock was pinned to the upper-right, it was in a predictable location. But now that it's in the center-bottom, it grows in both directions, so everything on it moves every time any

  • by Cmdln Daco ( 1183119 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @03:34PM (#57889266)

    Back in the old days, the most ardent Mac enthusiasts pooh-poohed unix. This was back when Apple was blowing many millions of dollars on their 'next generation Mac OS' which was a flop. Apple's developers really aren't good enough to produce a robust preemptive multitasking OS. They ended up just piggybacking on unix.

    Speaking to third party Apple developers, they have always been a captive group. The tools back in the 90's were expensive and you had to pretty much be a club member to do much at all.

    • Sure ... and that is why most Mac Software was written in either the "Mac App Environment" or under A/UX ... idiot.

  • BBEdit falls short of being able to do simple syntax highlighting without helper applications.

    It's unable to deal with simple nesting. For example, it can't properly highlight the following, even on a single line...

    {keyword [keyword {keyword content} thing] content}

    ...even creaky old mcedit, a component of midnight commander [midnight-commander.org], can handle that easily with a simple syntax definition that produces this:

    o square braces color 1
    o left-square-brace-adjacent keywords color 2
    o sqiggly braces color 3
    o left-sqiggly-bra

    • Does it do syntax highlighting well, by using an external program / library, thereby leveraging all of the work done by an for people who don't use BBEedit? That sounds like a winner to me. Why should each editor separately implement parsing of every version of every language, when we can have a better result with less effort by separating parsing programming languages from a text editor. Two different jobs.

      • Does it do syntax highlighting well, by using an external program / library

        No. The external program does it. Well or otherwise.

        Why should each editor separately implement parsing of every version of every language

        That's not what is at issue here. This is user-defined parsing of simple formatted text, using facilities provided by the editor. As to why this is a good idea (and why BBEdit does it, albeit poorly), [a] there are basically an infinite number of structured formatting possibilities for text, even j

        • > Simple parsing, IMHO anyway, shouldn't require external code.

          You're entitled to your opinions. A mathematically proven fact is that only Perl can parse Perl. If you want fully correct syntax highlighting for Perl, you have to implement the entire Perl language. In other words, only /usr/bin/perl can do it. Because of optional semi-colons, t-sql (Microsoft SQL) is just as difficult. You can think correct syntax highlighting "should be" easy, but the fact is you have to implement a complete programmin

    • Re:BBEdit (Score:4, Insightful)

      by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @04:03PM (#57889368)
      When I used to carpool with some other software engineers, we had one rule for the ride: it was not allowable to talk about religion, politics or editors.
    • Have to admit, even though I moved to the Mac platform some time ago, I never really got what the truly long time Mac users saw in programs like BBEdit...

      For me one draw of the Mac was how easy it was to run Emacs on it. Once you know Emacs well, it's pretty hard for any other editor to pull you away.

      • by hawk ( 1151 ) <hawk@eyry.org> on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @06:41PM (#57889930) Journal

        >For me one draw of the Mac was how easy it was to run Emacs on it. Once you know
        >Emacs well, it's pretty hard for any other editor to pull you away.

        No kidding.

        Every time I try, my cat disappears, my bank accounts get frozen, and mysterious messages threatening the cat flicker across the screen until I reload EMACS and enter M-C-A-uncle! and then C-M-purge-competing-editors-with-extreme-prejudice.

        My dog used to disappear, too, but I had too many typos on the last command, and never saw him again . . .

        hawk

        • Did you try to deinstall EMACS?

          I'm sorry for your dog. I'm sure your cat liked him. Probably more than she like(d/s) you. But well, so are the cats. My cat does not allow me to come closer than 1m to her ... problem probably is: she does not know she is my cat.

      • I always thought you where a troll.
        Telling us you live in China, but having a "sex doll, too" and your wife is fine with it.
        Your half german ancestry (or do I mix you up?)
        Your weird stance to nuclear energy and renewables.

        But know we know: you are a trollll!

        Who in his sane mind runs Emacs on a Mac? Vim is preinstalled! And you can get GVim ... just download it!!

        In case you need mental help, don't be despaired, brother! I call you now my brother, as it is common in asian countries, I can help you to get over

    • I spare me the usual answer on posts like this (but as you are curious I write it here: why would anyone want/need this?)
      So: which other editor supports different syntax highlighting for keywords based on the leading (, { or [ ?

      I started a few years ago to disable all highlighting, except for having some things bold or underlined. Syntax highlighting might once have been a good idea ... but the colour noise a typical IDE produces in our days is completely useless.

      In early Java coding styles it was promoted

  • by notthepainter ( 759494 ) <oblique@@@alum...mit...edu> on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @03:50PM (#57889318) Homepage
    I remember, way back in the day, putting together a mac for a broke friend of mine. Another friend knew one of the owners of Bare Bones, made a phone call, and they donated a color monitor to the project. Class act all around. (And yeah, to this day I'm still a customer!)
  • More than BBEdit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by david.emery ( 127135 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @03:52PM (#57889322)

    I've been using GraphicConverter and DefaultFolder since Mac OS 7 on PowerPC (and I think even back to 68000.) DefaultFolder, in particular, had to be redesigned from the ground up a couple years ago not because of change of processor, but due to changes in how Mac OS X handles security features and system extensions.

    Although it's not old enough to make "the old guard", I'm a huge fan of Aquamacs, a very well done EMACS port/reworking to be consistent with the Apple user interface. (Real EMACS beats BBEdit any day, IMHO.)

    • Never could get into Aquamacs... I guess it's because I still use Emacs on Linux (both in X and over ssh) daily so I want my Emacs on my mac to be as Linux-like as possible. That's why I always use: https://emacsformacosx.com/ [emacsformacosx.com]

      Like it says: it's just Emacs... no extra BS...

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I used to run System 7 software on my Amiga under emulation... Well, the CPU wasn't emulated so it was pretty fast, in fact I seem to recall the fastest Mac available back then was an Amiga.

      The OS was weird around that time. No real multitasking but it looked kinda nice. There was some software available for Mac that you couldn't get on the Amiga. I think StuffIt was the one I used the most, to open archives.

      • Well, the CPU wasn't emulated so it was pretty fast, in fact I seem to recall the fastest Mac available back then was an Amiga.

        Macs were 100% graphic computers with no graphics acceleration. Every pixel had to be laboriously milled by the CPU, and pounded into place with a wooden mallet. The Amiga had hardware to accelerate all common graphics operations (and then some) which is most of what made it faster. The first accelerated graphics option for the Macintosh was the 8â24 GC, which actually had more processing power onboard than the host CPU given that it was designed for the Macintosh II series. Further, I can't find a MSR

  • Great Mac Shareware (Score:4, Informative)

    by JBMcB ( 73720 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @04:48PM (#57889508)

    GraphicsConverter - basically a GUI version of ImageMagick - could open absolutely anything, and pretty damn fast at it

    SoundApp - GraphicConverter for sound files. It was the only thing fast enough to play high quality MP3s on my old PowerMac 6100

    Fetch - THE FTP client. Only thing I've used that's even close to being as simple and clean is FileZilla

    PlayerPro - All in one MOD file player with cool as hell spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes, per-track VU meters...

    Stuffit Expander / Compressor / ShrinkWrap - Open any archive or disk image file and do pretty much anything with it - the coolest thing is you could (trivially) script it to automatically expand something, drop the archive into one folder, then put the contents in another folder depending on the file type.

    ZTerm - Dialup client with Zmodem - essential for BBSes

    NIH Image - Freeware image editing software designed to do medical imaging analysis - but it had all kinds of crazy filters and color modification algorithms that let you do Photoshop-style color channel operations for free

    Realmz - Massive tile-based role playing game with tons of character options, weapons and gear

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @05:03PM (#57889562)

    Back when they charged over a hundred bucks for the software, I did wonder who the heck pays that much for a text editor. But eventually they started offering a free “lite” version (originally the lite version was cheaper, but not free) - and I found that to be really handy. After several years of using BBEdit Lite and then TextWrangler (they rebranded the free one), I decided to buy BBEdit - not because I needed the additional features, but to support the company.

    A lot of well-known Mac companies have bit the dust over the past decade (we hardly knew ye, FreeVerse)... but it’s nice that there are still a few stalwarts like BareBones and Omni left.

    • There are plenty more than Omni etc. just browse the Application store for Applications for Macs.

      Funny about Omni is, I pointed out in several emails that time in Germany e.g. in worksheets is written with an H (hora) for hours, not an S (Stunden). However the guy doing the translations insists on using S instead of H for timespans, times etc. Hence no one in corporate business buys the license for OmniOutliner ... a printout with S instead of H is completely useless. A year that is not a leap year has 8760

      • The new version of OmniOutliner is full of hipster crap and they've moved a bunch of features to the Pro version without fixing the bugs. The older version crashes on start on newer macOS. Oh, and it won't open OmniOutliner 2 files anymore. It annoyed me enough to start writing a replacement (which can open OO2 and OO3 files), rather than buy the new version.
        • Really? You wrote yourself a mini OO, which can read old files, impressive :D
          I used OO last time about 4 years ago, wanted to introduce it in a company ... but gave up after a few days daddeling with it ... but I don't remember what annoyed me so much.

          • Patches welcome! [github.com] The UI is currently very bad. I got it to the state where it was just about useable, but never quite found time to fix all of the annoying little bugs. Or, in fact, many of the things that annoyed me about OO (such as the fact that currency is not part of the document, it's from the user's locale, so you can't have one column of pounds and one of dollars).

            Oh, and it intentionally doesn't compress the XML file and does pretty-print it on output, so it works better with things like git.

            • I looked at your git project. You did a lot of work, Kudos!
              Never noticed that you only can have one currency ... wow.

  • by King_TJ ( 85913 ) on Tuesday January 01, 2019 @05:07PM (#57889578) Journal

    Interesting little recent story with that one....

    My workplace recently had a challenge. Our Finance dept. had been using a couple of Windows software applications made by EMC for the purpose of scanning in, indexing and providing view access to checks and invoices. Back when all of these were first set up, EMC allowed people to license them individually and use them as "building blocks" for your own document handling solutions. We hired a consulting firm to make them work in tandem with the Great Plains accounting package.

    Since then, it seems that EMC has become more focused on selling them as a bundled document management solution. Problem is? As we've upgraded Windows past 7 and on to 10, it broke compatibility with these programs. On the server side, we can't even do all of the latest . NET upgrades or security patches without it causing problems. The cost to pay for the upgrades and support licenses to get current versions of the tools is way more than we can justify for what we do with them. So we decided to migrate to a new solution.

    The first big stumbling block to migration was exporting all of our existing scanned images. Apparently, a really oddball version of TIFF was implemented in the EMC software and nothing else was able to open the files. We we able to contact GraphicsConverter's author and he took up the challenge of reverse engineering the file format and adding support to his software package. Thanks to that effort, we could finally set up a batch conversion using GraphicsConverter!

    IMO, it really is the premiere application out there, regardless of OS platform, for viewing and working with just about ALL image formats out there. If his software can't work with it, he's willing to make it happen -- even this long after developing the product.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      The actual arc of Mac software development was not so much changes from one processor family to another or 16 bit to 32 bit to 64 bit architectures, but APIs. The original Mac OS offered Object Pascal and the Macintosh Toolbox. Then there was MacApp and the Think Class Library (TCL) in Pascal and later versions of MacApp and CodeWarrior's PowerPlant in C++. The merger with Next brought Rhapsody and Yellow Box. Then there were Objective-C with Cocoa or Carbon APIs. And, there was also the necessary transitio

  • This is a good time to mention Jeff Vogel at Spiderweb Software and his old school role-playing games.
  • ...Hypercard. Wiki says the last release was in 1998. I've never been an Apple/Mac guy, but I have fond memories of using it in some sort of a summer computer camp in 1994.
  • Happened a few years back. A major reason for preferring PCalc on the Mac to anything built-in is that it could open multiple windows and so have multiple calculators active at the same time. In this iOS unification craze, it lost that ability a few years back with a promise the ability was coming back - well...nope. No it hasn't.

    With Spotlight there's also fewer reasons to use it casually since you can just type into the search bar. With more complex stuff it's just about as easy to enter in to Wolfram
  • by sad_ ( 7868 )

    developers who asks money for an editor supports it! how does he do it? it boggles the mind!
    now excuse me, while i enjoy my debian system...

  • I really wish I still had my old BBEdit "It doesn't suck!" t-shirt. I still use the program and it's still very useful. Multi-file grep search & replace saved my bacon many times in the early days of web dev.

    Also a shout-out to Stick Software! Mojave fractured Fracture and Satori, my all-time favorite screensavers. I contacted the publisher and he said he would eventually fix them. [This is software I licensed over 10 years ago, mind you].

It appears that PL/I (and its dialects) is, or will be, the most widely used higher level language for systems programming. -- J. Sammet

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