Casady & Greene Says "Goodnight"

powderhound writes "Longtime Mac software publisher Casady & Greene have said their final 'Goodnight.' The publisher of many notable Mac titles such as SpellCatcher, InfoGenie, iData, and Glider Pro, have decided to close the doors on July 3rd. Their web site contains the details of their decision. They will be sorely missed."

Comments

R�ves doux.

[Justen]

Cassady & Greene truly marketed some of the most innovative programs on the Mac. Conflict Catcher rightly earned all of the awards (and hearts) it did over the years. And Cassady & Greene is arguably the grandmother of Apple's "digital hub" strategy: iTunes was borne of SoundJam Pro, originally marketed by C&G. (The original developers of iTunes now work for Apple.)

It's been great.

Goodnight.

justen

Re:Why? Because of OSX

[PCM2]

In-line red-squiggle spell checking has changed some things but does little for spell checking the text box I am writing into right now.

I guess it's time for you to switch to Safari. In Apple's browser, all you have to do is right click on the text box and select "Check Spelling As You Type."

Re:Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand the moderation here, anyone who knows anything about Casady & Greene knows this was one of the defining aspects of the company.

And from the looks of it, the rants are gone. :(

Re:i have to wonder

[Hes Nikke]

Apple hasn't improved their font management at all since they added the font folder back in OS 8 (or was it 9?), it was due for an overhaul.
it was System 7.0 (or maybe 7.1) and i agree the OS X system needed an overhaul, but the classic system worked just fine.

HyperSpell

[kuwan]

Not so fast. C&G SpellCatcher, formerly Thunder 7 is an excellent, unique app that Cocoa services fail to replace because so few applications use Cocoa services.

That's what HyperSpell is for. It lets you access OS X's spellchecker from any application, and it's free.

--
This post checked with HyperSpell

Re:dealings with C&G

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the unfortunate luck to work for them in their summer intern program. Learned a lot about software companies like theirs that has made me steer clear of them ever since.

Sad but...

[coolmacdude]

C&G were giants on OS 9. They had many award winning products some of which I used. However, I haven't heard anything about them in the last few years. Aside from Soundjam becoming iTunes, they haven't really had one breakout product since the transition to OS X. I had thought they just dissolved a while ago since I had not heard of them in so long. Sad to see them go, but they really didn't have much invested in the X software arena.

Re:Crystal Quest ruled

[tentoesofterror]

Try these. Vmac works pretty well.

Re:i have to wonder

[Andre Breton]

"[...] their new font management system in Jaguar, which someone said "companies made a living off of", and now that business is gone, integrated into the macos."

The existing font managing tools are so terrible, terrible, terrible I just can't believe it. No way to use them effectivly. I just pray that Apple got it right and that it will work on my old slow Mac. I have a 400 Mhz G3 with 576 MB RAM and plenty of free diskspace, but all solutions choked on my ~5000 fonts. I don't want to use them all at once, just some help to handle them. Oh it's so terrible, terrible... If FontBook (what has Thorsten Lemke to say about the name anyway?) nails it, I'll fly to Cupertino and clean Steve's Mac (Or does he still have that NextStep PC?).

open source, .mac, osx

[Kerouassady]

All these things were the downfall of Casady and Greene. We still use Spell Catcher X on our photographers' laptops because Adobe hasn't put a spell check into the File Info window and our photographers are the kind that need a spell check on their captions. There was a place they filled a gap. Spell Catcher X is really a powerful tool and far beyond just a spell checker. That is an example of how to add value to a software that's previous functionality has been subsumed by the growth of the OS.

I always waited for Conflict Catcher to do the same. There was room for it. It would have need to be completely rewritten, but the basic concept is sound (looking for conflicts). If they'd had found a way to do a Clean-Install System/User Merge under OS 10, CC would have easily regained its throne.

I don't think C&G had the reources or maybe even the dedication to make the kind of investment leap to really make their tools valuable for OS 10 users. Between the explosion of freeware apps and open source projects, and cheap hosting on .Mac or free from Sourceforge, the competition just exploded. That's why, as an independent publisher or developer, you really have to inovate if you still want to make a living off shareware.

They were always more a publisher than developer, so and with resources like Sourceforge and .Mac, and the popularity of sites like Versiontracker and MacUpdate, the necessity of a developer needing a publisher has drastically reduced.

At least most of their developers have taken their software with them.

speaking of Glider

[zephc]

if anyone still has a Newton 2K or 2001 and wants to play Glider, a friend of mine ported it, its available here. Send him some $$ if u get it, he's getting married soon and u know how that goes :)