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Nova by Panic

nova.app

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Re: Nova by Panic

#441

Post by mhd »

Brendinooo wrote: post #2

> 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…

If I recall correctly, that's exactly what TextMate did years ago and what was one reason why it was considered to be so fast.

Plus ca change in a proprietary world.

Re: Nova by Panic

#443

Post by jyriand »

Landing page UI took me by suprise. It's refreshing in some sens, but little bit broken. Can't really click on the items in the navbar. Have to scroll down little bit first, and only then the links are clickable.

Re: Nova by Panic

#444

Post by dandellion »

fsloth wrote: post #424
noobermin wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if none of the replies read Drew's comment. Drew is talking about developing an editor for a closed source system and dealing with interfaces that break and then are hard to change, unlike open source systems that receive patches. It has nothing to do with "tweak[ing] the platform." Fixing a bug (which upstream would do, not you) is not tweaking, a bug is unintended behavior.

Yes, but I am not paid to fix the platform. From my employers point of view it is irrelevant if I could fix the platform since they most certainly don't want to pay for it. This is not evil . It's just how some parts of the industry work.

From your employer point of view you might be able to save a lot of time and money by submitting a patch for the bug upstream, instead of having to write your own text layout manager from scratch to work around an issue, which if you're unlucky won't even add any additional value to the client by itself other than enabling that feature.

Re: Nova by Panic

#445

Post by nhojb »

sho_hn wrote: post #261
Brendinooo wrote: post #2

> 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…

To me, the quote and what you put after came as a big surprise - I was ready to nod in agreement as you recognize this as a sad story about the platform. The last time I was working on a text editor (KDE's Kate) and found a bug in the text layout engine it was written against (Qt's), I wrote a patch, submitted it upstream and it made everyone else's apps better, too. I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and…

I've been a professional macOS developer for almost 20 years now and I can't tell you the number of times that this has been an issue.

With no access (or ability to patch) the platform source code you are left with a) hacky work-arounds, b) re-implement the component or c) change the app's design or feature to compensate. All of which are a pain / more work / risky etc, etc - just to work-around bugs in the platform.

Sure you can file radars (I do), but whether something gets fixed or not, is up to the gods...

Re: Nova by Panic

#446

Post by fsloth »

franga2000 wrote: post #435
fsloth wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, the prejudice! I like developing on Windows. Especially since the programs I write are run only on Windows. That's what the specific trillion dollar industry my employer serves uses mostly on desktop. I don't want to tweak the platform. I want to concentrate on the code I write. I could be equally productive on OS X or Linux, but frankly, I don't care . They are all interchangeable computational substrates for me…

Is is not incomparably faster to fix a problem in an open source component than it is to write a full replacement for it? Would your employer not prefer to see you spend a few days digging through source and submitting a patch upstream than spend many weeks writing a text layout engine from scratch? The result is the same (working text layout), but the time (== money) required is substantially less in the open source…

Sure. Perhaps the main constraint in my employers case is simply that the market uses Windows.

Re: Nova by Panic

#447

Post by mwcampbell »

ddevault wrote: post #340
sho_hn wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the quote and what you put after came as a big surprise - I was ready to nod in agreement as you recognize this as a sad story about the platform. The last time I was working on a text editor (KDE's Kate) and found a bug in the text layout engine it was written against (Qt's), I wrote a patch, submitted it upstream and it made everyone else's apps better, too. I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and…

>I can't imagine the world of hurt, discomfort and frustration of developing against a lib set I can't read source code of or improve. Thank you . It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system.

> It boggles the mind that anyone who can write code would ever use a closed source operating system.

Some of us want our work to actually reach people who don't write code or sysadmin their own computer, i.e. most people in the world. I, for one, think my effort is wasted if it doesn't benefit those people. So while working exclusively on a free-software platform is tempting from an ideological purity point of view (edit: and I envy people like you that manage to make a living doing it), I don't think I'd ever actually do it.

Edit: I should be more concrete and less snarky. Working on developer tools is good and necessary, and you can do that effectively on a free-software platform like Linux. But I choose to focus on end-user-facing software, particularly in the field of accessibility. I could work on desktop Linux accessibility, for the vanishingly small number of blind people who use desktop Linux (and that number is shrinking; one of my blind programmer friends just switched to Windows). Or I could target one or more of the mainstream platforms where the users actually are. I suppose I could work exclusively on web applications, but I don't think that would be the best use of my skills. And even then, while I could develop primarily on Linux, I'd have to test on other platforms too.

Re: Nova by Panic

#449

Post by emmanueloga_ »

panopticon wrote: post #240
gorbypark wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VS Code is built with Electron, so making an iPad VSCode would require porting Electron to Safari (Apple doesn’t allow alternative browser engines on iOS) . That should be doable seeing as the VSCode ports to the web seem to work okayish on Safari, but it world be a pretty big undertaking.

I use code-server[0] to access VSCode on my iPad in Safari, and it works pretty well. There are some rough edges, but (aside from the better shortcut integration and UI polish) I don't think a native app is going to provide a lot benefit because I can't execute arbitrary code on the iPad anyway. You're going to end up with a mostly remote experience either way. [0]: https://github.com/cdr/code-server

There's also Theia [1].

1: https://theia-ide.org/docs/composing_applications/

Re: Nova by Panic

#450

Post by zaro »

spiralganglion wrote: post #73

I see a lot of folks here comparing this to VS Code and asking "Why would I use this instead?" — I am exactly on the opposite side of that equation. Why would I use VS Code when I can use this? I've been using Atom for most of the decade (plus a bit of Sublime, and TextMate before), and I've loved being able to hack it to look and feel exactly how I want. There's a ton of custom CSS in my setup. Now, Atom is slow. Th…

> Atom is slow, VS Code is appreciably worse

I switched from Atom to VScode, precisely because VScode felt so much snapier.

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