Very happy to see Apple paying recognition!
BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
91–100 of 177 posts
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#92Say what you want about BBEdit no longer being useful in the modern era, but whenever I have to work with a multi-megabyte file that my IDE chokes on, BBEdit can open it no problem.
I’ve used BBEdit ages ago, but these days SublimeText is fine as well. And perhaps even better (again, not sure since I haven’t used BBEdit for ages).
From my experience SublimeText handles large files fine, but I never really tried to open multi-gigabyte size files.
I love SublimeText, it’s my favorite text editor and also multiplatform, so I have the same experience and tools on macOS, Windows & Linux.
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always thought this anecdote about Henry Ford is misleading, if not utterly false. In most cases giving people what you think is best for them and not what they ask for, results in a completely failure. Only a small percentage of cases actually leads to a groundbreaking new technology. But our memory is biased: we only tell success stories and forget the failures...
The Henry Ford quote is based on the premise that most people lack the technical knowledge and problem understanding needed to develop visionary solutions, and would just try to give you what they think is best for you (a faster horse, a cleaner car, a fancy new dependency, etc).
The Henry Ford quote is both dumb and extremely misapplied. It basically tells you that a successful, category-defining mass market product, does not look like what you'd get if you imagined asking a bunch of friends a quick question and took their imagined ad-hoc answers at face value.
I say imagined, because any actual horse owner would tell Ford they don't want a faster horse - they want a horse that's stronger, eats less, and shits less, as those were the real constraints of the horse platform[0].
(There's also a healthy dose of condescension in assuming "most people lack the (...) problem understanding". This may be true when you're thinking up a new class of a mass-market product. It's definitely not true when you're playing with some specialized product people already use productively.)
Also note the context here is pushing a new product category on the mass market. It's not about making an incremental improvement to existing product category, nor making an incremental improvement to existing product - two scenarios which most companies operate in, and in which this quote is most misapplied. In those scenarios, your users - again, note, not prospective clients, but existing users - most likely know the problem space way better than you do. They may have problems communicating the details of their feedback, so you need to actually try and understand what they're saying. Talk to them. Have them show you how they work.
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[0] - Strength translates to work/carrying capacity, eating less would give exponential savings on logistics to large horse operators, such as militaries, and as for the last part... suffice it to say that in Ford's times, horse manure was a bigger and more immediate health problem than air pollution is today.
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#94I started using BBedit around 1995. If I hadn't left Apple/MacOS for Linux about 15 years ago, I would definitely still be a (gladly paying) BBedit user!
Same story here basically, I loved BBEdit back in the pre-OS X era, especially after I installed Macsbug and learned how to dig my essays out of memory and write them to disk if anything crashed while I was writing...
I was on a Mac constantly from 1989-2009, I'd became a bit of a free software zealot and moved from an iBook to a ThinkPad. It's funny, because a lot of people were making the opposite move, and as I understand it the early 2010's are looked at as a bit of a by-gone golden age for Apple now. Can I ask why you chose to move?
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interesting. Do you remember which version (or approximate year) you're referring to? I've recently been writing my first real app for Mac OS 9, using C++ (MacZoop framework) and Codewarrior Pro 5 on a G4. There's some features I miss from my modern developer environment (decent version control!), but other than that it's been a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Certainly I've had no stability issues at all with the I…
2004-2005! Couldn't tell you the version though I'm afraid. I had nothing but issues with it, man it frustrated me haha. It's possible my memory has made the experience worse than it actually was however
I've no reason to doubt your experience at all, I'm really just idly curious. Was that on Windows though? 2004-2005 I think it was all but gone from the Mac, and people had moved to Project Builder (later Xcode), but maybe you were still working on some older project.
AFAIK the current CodeWarrior is based on Eclipse, if they're still updating it.
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#96Say what you want about BBEdit no longer being useful in the modern era, but whenever I have to work with a multi-megabyte file that my IDE chokes on, BBEdit can open it no problem.
I’ve used BBEdit ages ago, but these days SublimeText is fine as well. And perhaps even better (again, not sure since I haven’t used BBEdit for ages). From my experience SublimeText handles large files fine, but I never really tried to open multi-gigabyte size files. I love SublimeText, it’s my favorite text editor and also multiplatform, so I have the same experience and tools on macOS, Windows & Linux.
The killer feature of Sublime for me is cross platform. I am stuck in Windows at work, and I have a Mac at home. I don’t need to have to think where I am each time I edit text.
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#97What is the analogue of BBEdit on Windows? On Linux I guess it’s things like EMacs, and Vim?
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#98Never read an article inside the App Store. That's a first.
Me neither, and thanks to Apple’s idiotic thought of 1 country = 1 language I’m not even allowed to read it my the language of choice. Thanks Apple!
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#99UltraEdit I never understood why there was so much love for BBEdit on Mac and so little love for UltraEdit on Windows. They were both released around the same time, selling to the same audience just on different platforms. This was also during a time where there was many options.
I’m a Mac user, but for my job I have a company Windows laptop. It used to come with UE and I absolutely loved it. I work with large XML files (think 500 MB) a lot and UE would open/format/xpath/regex/etc. them with 0 issue. Then upper management forgot they employed engineers and did not renew the license. Now I’m stuck with VS Code which chokes when I open a 20 MB file.
UltraEdit has "true" support for large files meaning it doesn't have to load the whole thing into memory like most other editors (including BBEdit).
Re: BBEdit: Where Respect Is Due
#100> FTA: "We’ve always had the utmost respect for the user. Every internal decision about look and function answers the questions 'What does the customer need?' and 'How can we help them be more productive?' (Not 'How can we give them what they’re asking for?' because that isn’t the right question to answer.)" That's not utmost respect, but condescension when you think you always know /can figure out better than the us…
Developers who do what the users tell them to build the worst stuff. Imagine what a state your plumbing would be if you told your plumber where to put the pipes. The correct line of questioning is not "what do you want?" but "what is the problem you are having?".