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TextMate 2.0 will likely be Leopard-only

by Laurie A. Duncan Nov 15th 2006 at 7:00PM

In what would seem, on the surface, to be an odd move for a text editor, Macromates has stated that TextMate 2.0 will almost certainly be Leopard-only. Allan Odgaard gives some good reasons as to why, though. And it's not just because the Halloween icon will look better with Leopard's resolution independence!

Rather than paraphrase him, I'll paste what he's already said quite well:

First of all, 2.0 is a free upgrade, so I won't miss out on any upgrade fees from people that want to stay on Panther or Tiger.

Secondly, roughly 90% of my users are early adopters and have in all likelihood upgraded to Leopard within a few months of its release, so by keeping compatibility with older operating systems I am catering to less than 10% of my users.

Thirdly, it has a significant cost to stay backwards compatible, this price is paid in the form of:

  1. Time spent debugging (and sometimes making workarounds for) issues only present on the older OS version.
  2. Time spent implementing stuff that Apple offers for free on the new version of the OS.
  3. Not being able to make use of features only present on latest version of the OS when it's too impractical to conditionally make use of them.
  4. Code complexity, because it needs to do different things on different versions of the OS.

Is eliminating those costs worth a 10% drop in sales? You bet they are! The reason why I have kept Panther compatibility for this long has nothing to do with additional sales and all to do with me just not liking to cut people off.

I think Allan defends his decision quite well. Much better than Adobe does, in regard to Soundbooth's lack of PowerPC support. There's more to Allan's statement, but you should hop over to his blog to read the rest of it and let him know your thoughts on the issue.

To balance any potential backlash, Macromates will surely win a few hearts and minds by the free TextMate 2.0 upgrade. Any other TextMate users out there have an opinion on this?



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In what would seem, on the surface, to be an odd move for a text editor, Macromates has stated that TextMate 2.0 will almost certainly be...
 

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Rhywun

The quality of TextMate shows in that there are at least two Windows programs coming out that are nearly exact copies of it.

January 10 2007 at 12:34 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Shane

I would buy a Mac just so I can use TextMate. Personally, upgrading to Leopard is not an issue.

January 04 2007 at 3:03 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Coda

Reg, if you're a contract ninja, you're going to bring your own laptop with you. Secret stash of apps on your iPod? C'mon. I'm not going to knock you for valuing backwards compatibility or BBEdit, but the scenario you described seems unrealistic.

Corporate captives with stubborn IT staff and slow software purchase orders? That, sadly, is who's gonna take this on the chin.

January 02 2007 at 10:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Peter Hill

Best plain text editor out there.. I use it daily. I use it more than any other "word processor"

I will be upgrading to the new Mac OS on day one.. so backwards compatability is not an issue with me.

January 02 2007 at 6:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
R Muffet

While I understand the move, it will limit TextMate's overall appeal. Even if a developer's own system is cutting edge, they're often required to work on other machines which may not be.

For instance, say you are a top gun JavaScript coder and you visit a client who has contracted you to "web 2.0'ify" their HTML pages built on a their network of iMacs, which they bought 6 months ago and have no intention of upgrading from Tiger to Leopard.

You plug in your iPod with your favorite apps to edit the code with and - OUCH! - TextMate won't launch. So you end up editing in Apple TextEdit or struggle with Dreamweaver, etc, and miss all the collapsible codebreak, function popup goodness of a proper editor.

I've been using BBEdit since, well, forever, and its backward compatibility AND forward compatibility (it was one of the first Universal Binary apps I ever saw, coming out basically a week or two after the Intel Pentium 4 developer systems shipped) have been superb.

There's no way BBEdit would ever cut off the previous OS, so I'll be continuing to favor it over TextMate.

November 16 2006 at 6:41 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Max

The only problem with this is for those of us slaving at corporate jobs where the IT departments are loathe to update OSs right away. For this reason, I'm still working on Panther, even though my home machine is Tiger (and will go to Leopard).

November 16 2006 at 11:47 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
pixelslut

Fine with me. I dont know if Ill adopt leopard early or not.. depends on my cash flow and my motivation, but whe i do ill grab the upgrade, and if not i can use the current version. no biggie.

Oh and jsut to keep it going... TextMate is PURE CODING BLISS.

November 16 2006 at 9:43 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kevin

I can't imagine anyone who uses this product not upgrading to Leopard, except That Guy who doesn't upgrade because "Tiger does everything I need so NYAH!", so I applaud him for dumping Tiger once it's old news. :)

November 16 2006 at 9:07 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
sriracha

I'm totally fine with this -- I'm solidly in the upgrade-to-Leopard-immediately camp, so I'll definitely appreciate the free TM upgrade.

November 16 2006 at 8:24 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
carlo Righini

Textmate is an awesome text editor.

Developers, web designers/developers who are the people that use textmate are Im sure all looking forward to using Leopard and will move over very quickly.

This move shows Allan is keen to integrate the new technologies in leopard to make a better end product for us end-users.

So Im all for it.

And to think that its a free update to version 2.0, thats unbelievable.

November 16 2006 at 6:12 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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