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Nova by Panic

nova.app

131–140 of 549 posts

Re: Nova by Panic

#131
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

intellij is functionally the same. Buying a subscription gets you one year updates, and then whatever that last version is remains functional forever.

As I understand it, the IntelliJ version you can keep using forever is the one from the beginning of the subscription. So while the subscription was valid, you got upgrades, and then if you don't renew, you have to downgrade. It's their way of nudging customers to keep paying. It's working for me.

Slightly different, you get a fallback license for every version you've paid 12 months for [0]

[0] https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Re: Nova by Panic

#133

> Here's a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple's text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor's performance. We're not messing around! Seems like there's nobody better than Panic at doing this sort of thing. They're willing to push Apple's UI forward, but t…

The company itself would likely have become part of Apple if not for one bit of unlucky timing. Apple wanted to turn Panic's Mac OS 9 music player, Audion, into iTunes. https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

There's also a really cool episode about that (and other things) on their official podcast: https://podcast.panic.com

Re: Nova by Panic

#134
post #28

I love native Mac apps, I love Panic…but I’m not sure what this gets me over Visual Studio Code, besides a Preferences pane that isn’t inscrutable. I’m not sure there’s enough of a market on the Mac for another commercial code editor, as we already have BBEdit for hard-core text wrangling. (And obviously all the open-source options.)

> I’m not sure there’s enough of a market on the Mac for another commercial code editor, as we already have BBEdit for hard-core text wrangling.

That's going to be my issue with Nova, I think -- well, already is, as I've been beta-testing it. (I even have a theme in Nova's extension gallery!) There are a few things specifically relating to text manipulation rather than coding that BBEdit just does super well for me, and when I want a more IDE-like experience I end up in VSCode. Nova has foundation to be a great competitor in this space if and only if their extension library gets built out quickly, but that's, well, going to be a challenge. I'm still giving them a year of support to see what happens, though.

Re: Nova by Panic

#135
post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure there's a VSC plugin for that This part of your comments nails 100% why, for me (web developer, 90% in typescript these days), it's nearly impossible to justify paying for an IDE. Visual Studio code has almost everything that I need, and what it's not baked in, is easily done with a plug-in, which in the worst case I can write myself. But that's really a worst case scenario, since to this date it has never…

I almost agree; but in my experience, JetBrains IDEs are worth every cent. I am more productive on them than in Visual Studio Code, even for "simple" tasks, like raw HTML/CSS/JS editing.

I totally agree. It took me a while to changeover but after my entire development team did, I took notice. It's for sure better.

Re: Nova by Panic

#136

> Here's a little editor story for fun. During beta we found some bugs in Apple's text layout engine that we just could not fix. Our solution? Writing our own text layout manager… from scratch. Not only did this fix the bugs, but it also boosted our editor's performance. We're not messing around! Seems like there's nobody better than Panic at doing this sort of thing. They're willing to push Apple's UI forward, but t…

The company itself would likely have become part of Apple if not for one bit of unlucky timing. Apple wanted to turn Panic's Mac OS 9 music player, Audion, into iTunes. https://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/

Rest in peace, SoundJam. Best music player on Mac before Apple transformed it into the iTunes atrocity.

SoundJam's hierarchical playlist has yet to be replicated by any other music player to my knowledge.

Re: Nova by Panic

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tired IDEA (or siblings)? They focus on keyboard shortcuts and offer much more than vi can offer (full, integrated static analysis across with numerous languages and numerous context-sensitive tools like SSH, SCP, DB connectivity, etc). I use IDEA and feel absolutely crippled and useless in vi. It's largely because I never use vi and don't care to learn it. I'm very impressed with the IDEA tooling. There's a…

IDEA has the lead on raw features (and integration, since all the core plugins are made in-house), but at least on macOS the editor performs like trash. There are hundreds of milliseconds' latency for nearly every interaction, and that's despite spinning up the fans and impacting the rest of the system. I'm not a latency-buff; I happily used Atom until VSCode came along. But IDEA is unbearable in my experience (again…

There are known issues with scaled resolutions on macOS and JetBrains IDEs. If that is the case for you, using a tool like resolutionator to scale instead of the native macOS scaler, should solve the performance issues.

Re: Nova by Panic

#138
post #117

I am so confused why they didn't put efforts into making this an iPad app. There is a market for something like this that developers are crying out for, but on mac why would anyone use this over VSCode (and pay $99 for the privilege?)

Panic has an iOS code editor -- right now it's built off Coda, Nova's predecessor, but I'm sure if there's market demand for it, an iOS version will be coming.

Having said that, a lot of software developers -- including Panic -- have not had great experiences trying to sell development tools on iOS. It feels like there should be a big enough market for this, but it's unclear there's actually much of one. If Apple brought Xcode to iPadOS it would likely require changes to the OS to support that kind of development toolchain, and that would make it easier for other companies to bring their tools, both commercial and free. But I half-suspect the official Apple answer to "when are you gonna let us develop on iPadOS" will be "may we interest you in this Apple Silicon-based, touch screen MacBook that natively runs iPad apps."

Re: Nova by Panic

#139
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's for people that want their text editor to feel like a Mac app. VS Code is great, but it doesn't feel very Apple-y.

Oh I get that’s the market, I just hope said market is large enough for them.

The market is huge. There are quite a few programmers, and they are more willing than most to spend money on software. Graphic design is probably bigger, but other than that? I know accountants and lawyers that are fine with Google Docs and Sheets these days.

As another datapoint, I seem to remember IntelliJ doing >100 Million € in revenue p.a.

Re: Nova by Panic

#140
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New thing this year, but VSCode + with Apple's SourceKit LSP extension [1] has been working surprisingly well for me. Glad to have more alternatives to Xcode. Have been using SPM's "swift build" + some copy commands to create a fully functional signable bundle, no need even for an .xcodeproj. [1] https://nshipster.com/vscode/

I'm curious about this. Could you do iOS app development this way? Or at least native Mac development using cocoa like you could in xcode?

Yes! The build just produces a single executable. For example, in a Mac app this would be the file inside Contents/MacOS.

You then need to create a folder with an .app extension, set up a simple folder structure, and add some necessities such as the Info.plist file and your resources like the app icon/images. And codesign or notarize depending on your deployment requirements.

Code completion works great for dev and I've found VSCode to be snappier than Xcode even if the underlying engine (SourceKit) is supposed to be the same. The only thing "missing" is not having Interface Builder, but probably most serious projects use code-generated UIs anyway. You could, of course, still make an .xib file in Xcode and use it in your VSCode project. (I don't have a MainMenu.xib myself.)

See: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

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