Pepper Author Calls It Quits

gruber writes "Maarten Hekkelman, author of the cross-platform text editor Pepper, has thrown in the towel. He announced last week that he's discontinuing Pepper. He agreed to an interview with me, on topics ranging from the state of Mac OS X to the difficulties of cross-platform development." It's quite an interesting read, even if he does currently prefer Windows XP over Mac OS X and Linux.

Comments

Tucows

[perlyking]

The most interesting thing about the article for me is that Tucows let you buy a higher rating!

so?

[Inominate]

Another programmer gets burned out on thier project, big deal. Is the editor in widespread use? A quick search on google doesnt yield anything obvious.

Just another case of a programmer fed up with thier project, angry that he's not making enough money on it. Doesn't look like he's willing to opensource his code either.

Screw him.

Can't get too excited about this..

[Otter]

He's an old Be guy who doesn't like OS X. Mac users found his app buggy and saw no reason to switch from the beloved BBEdit. (He agrees that no one took much interest in it.) And Linux users, who won't pay for anything, certainly wouldn't pay for a new text editor.

Like someone else said, the most interesting factoid was that you can buy rating stars on Tucows. Also, I had to laugh at:

I had hoped that with the new popularity of Linux and FreeBSD there might be more and more users coming from Mac OS or Windows who would like to use a more comfortable editor.

But I was wrong. I sold three copies and one of those three was a fraud. I did have thousands of downloads though.

I think this guy is crying out to be a Qt developer....

Leaving OS X Because of Cocoa

[dthable]

I found the sections on Cocoa to be intresting. From some general reading on the topic, it looks like more hobby developers are embracing Cocoa for their development, yet the commercial developers keep moving away from it. Another developer scraps his Mac version of the program because development for OS X requires buying too much into the Jobs way of thinking. I do hope that someone at Apple sees this and really pushes for moving back towards C++ instead of Cocoa.

Re:Leaving OS X Because of Cocoa

[dthable]

God, I hope not. IMHO, C++ is just overkill for most of the native development on OS X. Then again, I am not a C++ fan.

I respect the fact that other people would rather use another programming language where I would pick C++. Truth be told, C++ is one of the best languages for writing cross platform, platform specific code (I dislike the JFC/Swing idea that everyone is forced into a single look and feel). If I had to choose a language for Mac only development, I would probably select ObjC.

Anyway, if the issue is Cocoa, then Apple would have to provide C++ Cocoa APIs, instead of Objective-C.

That's what I am looking and trying to build support for. Like the .Net WinForm API, you can write APIs for many different languages that all do roughly the same thing. There are a number of individual works, like Coplan's Advanced C++, that work through the issues of making C++ more run time based than it currently is.

I don't know about how Steve Jobs thinks, but the Cocoa APIs are pretty solid Model-View-Controller stuff -- pretty venerable and proven object technology.

Of course. Anyone who attempt cross platform development really needs MVC, but ObjC doesn't provide the MVC, the design of the Cocoa libraries provide the MVC nature of the program.

Re:Leaving OS X Because of Cocoa

[bnenning]

What makes ObjC a better language?

Primarily, a dynamic runtime. Want to know if an object implements a method? Ask it with -respondsToSelector:. Want to get a class object given its name? NSClassFromString(). Want to set a property of an object, when both the property name and value are determined at runtime? Use -takeValue:forKey:. C++ has none of these capabilities (at least last time I checked), and they are very useful in a variety of areas.

Almost all Software Engineers agree that most of the software development process can/should be automated.

Which is another argument for Objective-C, since programs using it tend to be much shorter than C++ programs. The line you don't have to write doesn't have a bug.

C++ is going to allow engineers to develop software that doesn't depend on run time conditions, but more on compile time conditions.

And you can write static code in ObjC if you want to. But in C++ as soon as you want dynamic behavior, you end up writing tons of code (and therefore bugs) to reproduce the features that more dynamic languages give you for free.

Application Darwinism at work?

[c13v3rm0nk3y]

I hate to say it, but we may be seeing "Application Darwinism" at work here.

I've been on the lookout for a fast cheap text (only) editor to do HTML development with, on OS X. Many of the apps I've tried are just too clunky for me to consider paying anything for them. I eventually went back to VIM, even though it lacks some basic Mac functionality (i.e., it isn't a true document-based app). Since my LCD for a text editor is vi, this isn't so much of a hardship. I don't suggest everyone run out and use it on a daily basis. It work for me, but as they say: "Closed course. Professional driver".

I took a look at Pepper for a day or two, and I found it a very odd app. It seemed to operate contrary to some OS X usage expectations, and it rendered any typeface I chose terribly. The interface just felt all wrong to me. It crashed enough that I simply considered it "beta" and moved on.

I have similar complaints about the much beloved (but not by me) BBEdit.

I'm not saying that any of these editors are necessarily bad. If you like it, by all means, use it. However, I don't think all the comments about Pepper on Version Tracker are necessarily spurious. It seems that Pepper didn't quite cut it for other OS X users, as well.

Having less variety of apps available to OS X is sad, and some people will probably miss Pepper (even if they didn't pay for it), but I can't help but think that if it was a little more of a killer app, it would have survived.

Interesting part of the interview...

[Meat Blaster]

Did you expect Pepper to be successful on Linux? Was it?

I had hoped that with the new popularity of Linux and FreeBSD there might be more and more users coming from Mac OS or Windows who would like to use a more comfortable editor.

But I was wrong. I sold three copies and one of those three was a fraud. I did have thousands of downloads though.

Wow, that's unfortunate. But I can't say I'm surprised -- the only commercial Linux software that seems to sell are things like 3D rendering and animation software -- packages that cost many thousands of dollars.

I am afraid that will be the future of the entire software industry. Eventually it will only be possible to sell huge software packages with lots of support; all the small apps will be open source in the end.

Is this a bad thing? While I too wouldn't have minded being a full-fledged programmer in time to get rich developing small apps such as file archival software or FOSSIL drivers, there is a great deal of support that comes from having every user of the open-source small apps be a beta tester and potentially a developer.

I think it's less likely that Pepper was too small of an application to sell it in this brave new world than it is that Linux users just didn't hear about it or care. I don't mean this in a bad way - it takes a while for decent advertising to work, but how many people are defecting from Mac to Linux?

That's part of what aggravates me about many commercial developers peddling their wares on Linux... they don't take the situation seriously enough going in and they badmouth the whole situation on the way out. It's still a niche market. There are something like 10% of the users of Windows (similar to Mac numbers, but with fewer workstations/desktops in the mix), and a bounty of applications each of which does about 80% of what one wants and each in a different way, but all without costing a cent. So, in general, commercial products come to us by companies that understand only the needs of Windows users, with less/no support, less stability, and higher price tags.

In his case, it sounds like he was one of the few that was being fairly reasonable about all of the above points, and I would have seriously thought about buying his product, but I've never heard of it. Now that I have, he's pulled out already. Sorry.