Category: software

Once upon a time, Bare Bones Software, makers of BBEdit, ruled the Mac text editor world. They had a free version, BBEdit Lite, which hooked you in, and then you’d get so used to it, you’d pay mucho buckos to get their pay version with added extra features.

Eventually they looked around at all the people using BBEdit Lite and realized, “we’re not getting money from these people! We must eliminate BBEdit Lite and only let people use BBEdit, which costs three digits of dollars. Then we will be rich, and the mooching will stop.”

They found that people were not willing to go from “free” to “three digits of dollars,” so they added TextWrangler, a chopped down wussified version of BBEdit which was only in the mid two digits of dollars.

However, people also weren’t interested in something which was both “wussified” and “two digits of dollars.” So the ones who weren’t willing to go with the three digits started looking elsewhere, because it turned out other developers were working on modestly-two-digit-priced text editors which weren’t deliberately wussified, substandard versions of a better editor. SubEthaEdit, TextMate, and others.

Finally Bare Bones Software achieved enlightenment, and they started giving away TextWrangler for free and adding some features to it, thus returning things to the way they were when BareBones was king.

And there was peace in the land.

TextWrangler rocks.

Steve Dekorte notices that the metaphoricity of modern desktop metaphors has been diluted badly. I know I’ve seen these observations before from someone mourning the passage of OS 9 in the face of OS X — Was it Tog? Zarf? mpt?

I remember someone pointing out that Classic Mac OS took great pains to give the impression that an icon wasn’t just a representation of a file, it was that file, as far as the user need be concerned. And a window wasn’t just a representation of a folder, it was that folder (at least in its open state). You couldn’t have two Finder windows open displaying the same directory because that window was that directory. I understand newer versions of GNOME use this technique, while Apple has long abandoned it in favor of the NeXTy finder windows they have now.

Good design isn’t always what you choose to do, sometimes it’s what you choose not to do.

I’m not sure any Unix-based OS is ever going to have a really good, intuitive GUI, because the GUI is always going to be a construct on top of and separable from the primary underlying text-based system. Although ROX seems like a step in that direction — it integrates the GUI and underlying filesystem better than any other Unix GUI I’ve seen — at the cost of changing the traditional Unix customs about the structure of the filesystem.

“Free” software politics. – KenBlog quoting Kerneltrap via Steve Dekorte:

JA: What about the programmers…

Richard Stallman: What about them? The programmers writing non-free software? They are doing something antisocial. They should get some other job.

JA: Such as?

Richard Stallman: There are thousands of different jobs people can have in society without developing non-free software. You can even be a programmer. Most paid programmers are developing custom software–only a small fraction are developing non-free software. The small fraction of proprietary software jobs are not hard to avoid.”

RMS can fuck off now. ‘k, thx. Fucking hippie.

Actually RMS makes a lot of good points in that interview, including ones about problems of globalism. But his comment made me think about my own (very small and limited) participation in the IT industry, and what he said rang true: I’ve been a programmer for one year, and worked directly with programmers in one capacity or another for about six or seven years, and only in the first couple years of that time was I working with anyone who sold software to customers with a proprietary license. The rest of the time it was all companies writing software for their own use. Sometimes it was companies who released software open source, sometimes they just kept it under wraps and used it themselves, but they weren’t selling proprietary software with a shrink-wrap license or whatever.

And to be honest, those companies had their shiznit together much more than the ones I worked for the first couple years who sold their software as their product. They were pretty sleazebaggish. All inflicting copy protection nightmares on people, all filling their customers’ ears full of lies about when the the next version would be released and how many bugs it would fix, all trying to leverage their control over a set of tools to force another company into bankruptcy so they could buy it and dominate the market (I kid you not, that’s apparently what one of my employers did shortly after I left — the plan failed, btw). On the whole, companies who sell proprietary software seem to have a much greater than average tendency to fall into completely sleazebag practices. (Read that sentence carefully before you think I’m trying to generalize about *all* proprietary software companies.)

I think it’s just the nature of the game, relying entirely on artificial, legally-mandated scarcity for your business model (and that’s what proprietary licenses do: legally mandate artificial scarcity). It’s a tough game to play, the deck is stacked against you, and you’re always tempted to get an advantage in some dubious way.