TextMate News

by Shawn Van Ittersum

Allan,

Please consider the roles diagrammed and described here:

http://www.dfpug.de/loseblattsammlung/online/workshop/design_patterns/sonstiges.htm

It says that the lead developer should write the documentation. There’s an editor role to revise the developer’s first draft (or dictations, but that would be pretty slow and inefficient). No tech writer to come up with 100% original work, though. Tech writers who don’t develop and don’t know the code need to be told what to write or given a fairly complete draft.

Though Brooks’ model may not be perfect, it is well-known and tested, and one could certainly do much worse. It may not be perfect for you and the way you like to work, but I wonder if it still might somehow be of use to you.

You’ve done a good job describing features of TM1 on this blog. Are you opposed to doing the same for TM2 only because it’s not released yet? Or because you’re having too much fun coding to pause for writing here? It’s not meant as an attack; I’m just curious.

What can people in the community do to help you along with the roles described in the synopsis linked above?

by Zack

The pharaohs had a pretty good methodology for building pyramids, too. That doesn’t mean it’s especially applicable to his situation.

by Alex

What slave labor?

by Zack

Hey, whatever gets TM2 out the door.

by Shawn Van Ittersum

BTW, I’m not saying Allan should hire ten people. I use Brooks’ model as a guide to a separation of roles, which may be combined.

When a project grows beyond the capacity of one person, and more people are needed, the leader can experiment with responsibility allocations to see what works, or one can use the tried and tested methodologies of leading texts. I just wanted to offer that to Allan in case it is helpful in advancing the project.

14 August 2009

by Samo

Eh, I don’t care how it happens and if it takes a month or three longer because Allan does/doesn’t write the Docs. I know how painful project “babies” can be, so whatever happens, I’ll buy my 2.0 licence and hope Allan had at least some amount of fun doing it.

And I’ll never understand how people can be as spiteful with someone like Allan in the Comments (of previous blog entries). Dissapointed that there’s no 2.0 yet and offering constructive criticism, ok, but being an ass and bringing someone down who clearly cared about his product is just low. It’s not like the people can not use Eclipse or something…

14 August 2009

by Philip Thrasher

Shawn,

I just wanted to say that your tone is much improved in your comments in this post. Not that I’m any sort of comment police officer, nor do I care to be. Just thought you might like that recognition.

Samo,

I agree with you, except that TM 1.5 is still the best out there. It’s funny that some have come close, but no one has matched TM 1.5 yet. All the more reason to be antsy about what’s coming in 2.0

Allen is a very talented indie programmer. If I had the money, I’d donate to him for the purposes of coding just so that more great apps could be cranked out of macromates. I’ll just have to settle for buying a 2.0 license. Can’t wait till it comes out.

Keep up the good work Allen. ;-)

Allen, I’d write for free for you if you’d like. It’s something I enjoy doing. Please email me if it’s something you’d be interested in letting me do. If not, no hard feelings.

email address: philipthrasher at gmail

14 August 2009

by Allan Odgaard

Shawn: Yes, the reason I don’t want to write specifics about 2.0 is because it is not complete.

One may say that I could write about what I have, but I don’t consider anything “set in stone” until the product actually ships. This might sound scary (that after two years, I still don’t consider my code base stable) but an example is the layout stuff described in this recent post. It insinuates that you can have mixed fonts in your document, that is a feature I did long ago, but using the naive solution method.

The actual layout part is pretty self-contained, so it was little work moving to better data structures, but until recently, I did not know how to solve the performance problem, and if it hadn’t been solved, I would have needed to re-evaluate the features involved (possibly pulled back on some).

Regardless of how I try to phrase things, users are prone to read what I write as promises and hold me accountable for delivering on these, take the third last comment on the Working on It post, it literally says “stop promising and not delivering” or take your own letter some years back about how you “bought TextMate in good faith” (and I feel bad for quoting you here, as I agree with Philip, your tone is much improved and I appreciate that!).

Adding to that, I am far more passionate about my vision for TextMate 2 than the current code, so when I talk about it, I’ll often give examples of how I hope the eventual user experience will be, but there is still some way to go, and until I have actually written every single line of code required to get to that envisioned user experience, I can’t say with 100% certainty that this is how it will be — i.e. until the code is 100% written, the product is vaporware, and I prefer to treat it like that.

by Nick

The problem is I am a new Mac user and I want to use TextMate. But I am not going to drop the very high price tag just to have a new version come out a month later and have to pay for an upgrade.

So I am kind of in limbo as to what I want to do, and while I understand that you are busy and do not like to make blog posts, I think simple timeline/progress updates would be nice.

I have not decided if I will move Adobe apps to my mac, so this will be the most expensive app on my Mac. :P

by Carpii

TO be fair Nick, I think if you read the above comments, it seems pretty unlikely TM2 is going to be released anytime soon :)

It would be nice if a purchase included free upgrades for a period of 6 months though, I agree.

by Philip Thrasher

Nick,

You say TM is very high priced, but how much money will you make as a result of using it? My general coding project pays out anywhere from as little as 100 dollars to as much as a few thousand. Even on the smallest scale, the investment is almost immediately returned.

In all honesty, if he released a new version every quarter at the same price and no free upgrades, I’d buy every single one if it were a nice upgrade seeing as how the investment has such a high rate of return.

Just food for thought.

by Martin Kühl

Nick, Carpii,

you are aware that TM2 is planned as a free upgrade to TM1 users, right?https://wiki.macromates.com/FAQ/TextMate2

by Carpii

Oh, I didnt know that, no. Sorry is my post was misleading anyone

In that case this is great news, thanks :))

16 August 2009

by Jonathan Wells

TM2’s sheer existence will please many, but I maintain that the product still feels ahead of its time, and still satisfies me far more than Coda, Espresso, or any other mac only editor can. Of those products, TM1 is the only one that feels complete. When TM2 does hit the scene, though, the name alone is going to sell copies I’ll bet.

by Wei

Why can’t you just release and iterate based on user feedback? Everyone is doing it… look how well the iPhone apps in the Apple store are doing.

There are new things coming out all the time… sitting on the code base will only ensure things go out of date by the time you are ready for debut.

Release and iterate.

by tschundeee

Hey I have to agree to Wei. You had very big success with TM1 and now it seems that there is a development deadlock. The biggest advantage of Textmate is not the App itself (btw: it really rocks), it’s the community around it that builds a whole eco-system of plugins. Have you ever thought about getting the community involved into TM2 development? There are so many talented dudes out there willing to help you get TM2 ready. You could make it open source, donation-ware or free for private use and charge for commercial usage. But please don’t let Textmate slowly die… Release and iterate is in my view also a good thing because you can get help and feedback from the community.

by Watts

Nick and Carpii – ironically, a few of us have been none-too-gracefully suggesting to Mr. Odgaard that TextMate 2 shouldn’t be a free upgrade. It’s painfully obvious that it’s a ground-up rewrite of the editor, which has both good and bad elements to it, but it seems like there’s certainly enough there to justify a €12 upgrade price. (That’s a somewhat randomly-chosen number, but one that seems reasonable.) Speaking completely off the cuff, a plausible way to avoid a “late adopter penalty” for new buyers would simply be to have a policy that once TM 2 goes into public beta, any purchases of TM 1.5 would get a free upgrade to the final version of TM 2.

As for “release and iterate,” well… sigh. Normally I’m against the idea of releasing a public beta that isn’t a genuine beta in the old-school sense, i.e., the developer thinks it’s likely that it’s stable enough for production use, just not guaranteed, and is trying to shake out remaining bugs. But normally, we’re not talking about a program that’s widely perceived as being over a year behind schedule. (Note that it isn’t “years behind”; TM 2 had an ETA of “after Leopard,” which came out in October 2007. Nobody should rationally have been expecting it before early-to-mid 2008.) One could make a plausible case that releasing an alpha version of TM 2 very soon, even knowing it’s buggier than a South American jungle, is actually a pretty good idea.