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Bare Bones Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Posted by pudge on from the without-bbedit-i-would-not-even-have-an-ass-to-save dept.

An anonymous user writes, "Bare Bones, makers of BBEdit, 'celebrates 3650 days of saving your ass' (according to the new t-shirt) with the the BBEdit Anthology, a limited edition autographed CD with every final commercial release of BBEdit, plus the free versions as 'bonus tracks.' Liner notes are included." It's $250, comes with a BBEdit 7 license, and only 1,000 were produced. OK, the price is a little steep, but it's a collector's item. And the company is also offering a 10% discount on any product orders through June 30, so it is only $225! I still remember the first time I saw BBEdit, a Mac text editor, and I thought, "what, like a word processor?" Some things never change ...

11 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Pricey by colonel.sys · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes, BB is pretty cool. But:

    I had used the Lite version for quite a while and when they started charging for that, Hydra came along and made me switch (http://hydra.globalse.org) -- pretty cool program. Group-Editing with Rendezvous, freeware and such.

    Just waiting for Apple to get their Finder-FTP working with read/write!

    --
    We are all individualists!
    1. Re:Pricey by dogzilla · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I agree that BBEdit is getting a little pricey, but Hydra really isn't comparable to BBEdit yet. It has some cool features, and certainly shows a lot of promise, but comparing any current version of BBEdit to Hydra at this point just makes Hydra look like "My First Text Editor".

      I'd gladly consider an alternative to BBEdit (especially if someone could replicate the Allaire Homesite file-management and tabbed editing interface on the Mac (why is this so hard? Does noone else find it annoying to have 15 windows open at the same time?). If that alternative turns out to be Hydra, so much the better since I dig it's collaborative features. But right now Hydra's basically a one-trick pony - it's TextEdit with Rendezvous and syntax coloring. Seems to me it needs way more functionality before it can stand next to BBEdit (compare the two search/replace windows for a quick example of how far Hydra needs to go).

      --
      The crimes of eBay are a disgrace to it's pig latin heritage!
    2. Re:Pricey by kosibar · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The two features I find the most important in a text editor are FTP and tabbed editing. I often find that I have 10 windows open for one project, and a couple of windows for another project that a customer called me about and I'm waiting for a call back... gets to be a mess! (Especially when two of them are the same filename from a different site.)

      Having a separate window for each project I have open, then tabs for the individual files, would be absolutely perfect! Heck, I'd even pay the $250 ($225) to get that CD if it were the only way to get it. It's that valueable to me.

      Of course, the FTP features wouldn't mean much if Apple fixed their built-in FTP. The BBEdit FTP features are weak anyway - I can't even make a new folder in the browser. And I find that saving a file can be dreadfully slow sometimes, where Transmit can upload in the blink of an eye.

      I like BBEdit overall, though I tend to find the interface to be a little clumsy. It has some very useful text editing features, like zapping gremlins, hard wrapping text, changing case, etc. Things that every text editor should have.

      Rich

    3. Re:Pricey by pudge · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I love using Interarchy for edit via FTP, especially now that it does SFTP. It has a feature to "Edit with BBEdit," and automatically saves changes when you save in BBEdit. Much nicer than using BBEdit's built-in FTP (which I used before this feature was added to Interarchy).

  2. BBedit going out with a bang? by jeeves99 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Web-design has evolved into its own art form. More and more webpages are popping up with elaborate layering schemes and graphical widgets. Toss in some php scripts and you've created a beautiful mess that one could never code by hand.

    Along this vein, does BBedit stand a chance any more? I for one have switched to Dreamweaver. When I need to edit the source, dreamweaver has a more than adequete color-schemed text interface.

    I admit this limited-CD release is a really cool idea, but it rings a little too loud as a final hurrah of an obsolete product.

    1. Re:BBedit going out with a bang? by jcbphi · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Some would argue that in the long run, when your beautiful mess isn't rendering properly and its time to debug your HTML+CSS+PHP+who-knows-what, you may regret not knowing the intricacies of your code.

      Having used Dreamweaver (and few other visual editors) in the past, I doubt its ability to create a working site that I could not create by hand. Sure it speeds a lot of things up a lot, but so does the HTML tag templates built into BBEdit

      While Dreamweaver does offer a window for editing source directly, I would never call it adequate. Just because you can edit text does not mean its a substitute for a full blown text editor. (Does anyone know if Dreamweaver can use an external editor? I don't remember.)

    2. Re:BBedit going out with a bang? by raju1kabir · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Web-design has evolved into its own art form. More and more webpages are popping up with elaborate layering schemes and graphical widgets. Toss in some php scripts and you've created a beautiful mess that one could never code by hand.

      Not to be insulting, but the only people I know who don't code by hand are hacks who don't have to or aren't able to create complex, long-term maintainable sites.

      Doing it with the GUI just doesn't scale, once you get past the Photoshop/Imageready stage.

      --
      "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
    3. Re:BBedit going out with a bang? by JJahn · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Never code by hand? I regularly do code complex websites using php and such by hand. Tried Dreamweaver but I couldn't stand it. Kind of a personal preference thing i think.

  3. Re:3650, or 3652 by davesag · · Score: 3, Interesting
    1996 and 2000 are the only two leap years in the last 10 years, so yes it should be 3652 days of saving our arses,

    Now if BBEdit could only add langauge sensitive auto completion and contextual menu based x-reffing of java docs (you know crtl click on a method to open the java source it is defined in at that method) and add parsing of ant scripts such that the targets appear in the function list I'd be even happier and it would stop bastard eclipse users from taunting me.

    real mac java programmers use bbedit and the terminal after all.

    --
    I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
  4. Comes with Chocolat by WatertonMan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hey, not only did it come in the mail today, but it came with Chocolat with some exclusive chocolat from this Berkeley company. Great! Plus I didn't have to pay for it! (The folks at BBEdit sent it to me for free since we'd submitted some code *way* back)

  5. it is pretty versatile by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    If their slogan is "XXXX days of saving your ass"...well, i gotta admit, they saved mine.

    BBEdit is a good hex editor. I really haven't used any other hex editor for the Mac, but, I really don't feel that I need to.

    I was having problems with a a corrupt file. Flash (.FLA). The only advice I could ever get about how to recover it was to choose Save As... in Flash to create a "Clean Copy". Of course, it didn't work (thank you for your sagicity, Macromedia. thanks you for your support)
    But, I managed to actually salvage more than 90% of the file by using BBEdit to make a cleaner back up copy. It allowed me to get most of my work back. This, in comparison to Flash, which just "ate my homework, spat it up and ate it again".

    Add that bit of goodness, to using it to clean up HTML, as a word processor and to view contents of invisible files and BBEdit has made my life a bit easier. (and it ain't an easy life.)