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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."
Crystal Quest used the mouse better than any other game until the FPSes came along. That was a fun game.
As for the rest of the stuff C&G published, well, I never needed any of it...
After OS X came out, I stopped using Conflict Catcher, too (which, yes, is still on my 6500).
Just thinking this through: Apple definitely dealt a mjor blow buying SoundJam off of C&G, but does anyone think of C&G as an OS X developer?
Oh, well. Farewell, C&G. We'll miss you.
I think as Mac OS X becomes more ubiquitous, we'll witness a renaissance of Mac development and publishing. It's already showing with products like Transmit and Hydra (to name just a couple).
I'm pretty new to the Mac world -- an OS X convert... so I've never heard of these guys. But it sounds like the timing might have followed that of the introduction of the new OS. Was their inability to keep going due to something about OS X?
I love this operating system, but I sometimes wonder how much all the goodies that come with it (X11, iTunes, iPhoto, iChat, Safari, Mail.app, Address Book.app, and iCal are all in my Dock) are hurting independent developers who innovated for the platform before Apple got around to incorporating those functions into the OS.
if apple is shooting itself with the many free programs that come bundled with macos X... The whole sherlock vs. watson thing, where apple made a product VERY similar to a competing program, or 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. Jaguar is awesome, and the software that comes with it is top notch, but when do you draw the line between building software in house, and relying on developers to write software for you?
"OSX killed Extension Manager by way of UNIX, SoundJam by way of buyout, and Spellchecker with built in Cocoa services."
/troll
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. 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. SpellCatcher captures all text input and can log it if you want to snoop/document. What killed it in part was the unfortunate amount of time it required to port to OS X. Fortunately, the C&G site points to another company that has picked it up.
troll/ To say that Cocoa services replaced SpellCatcher is to say that Spring-loaded folders replaced PopUpFolder, for those who remember it.
We contacted them when we were looking for a publisher.
They wanted 85%, wanted to delay payments to us for up to 180 days,
if they wanted new "features" either we had to implement them or
they would pay to have it done and -we- would have the cost deducted
from royalties. We said no thanks.
When talking to them, the SoundJam/iTunes thing happened a few months earlier
and I asked the guy about it. He said that Apple approached them,
with a fixed price. They advised them to take it, or get buried by an Apple product.
He wouldn't say how much they got, but it wasn't a huge number, plus they had
to relinquish the programmers as part of the deal. I like Apple, and I like iTunes
and what it's become, but Apple sort of rolled over them and they never recovered.
I still have my Glider Pro CD
/me cries
Brings back memories
I worked for Casady & Greene one summer during college. I typed product registration info into the database, answered phones, beta tested, stuck labels on disks (OK, that should date me), whatever needed to be done. Working there was great - everyone really was like family, and the programmers' dedication to their craft was inspiring. I was always amazed that software created in a little storefront next to the pizza parlor in my neighborhood was so globally popular (my friends in college played Crystal Quest and Glider).
Some random memories of C&G:
- Seeing my first IBM computer with a full-color monitor and GUI. The PC tech support guy was amused that I thought all IBM's had green screens.
- Beta testing a paint program that simulated natural media. It was at least as good as Aldus SuperPaint, the Mac favorite at the time, but for some reason I never heard of it again.
- The intraoffice instant messaging system that one of the programmers built. Everyone spent so much time sending messages to each other, the boss shut it down after just a few days.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Did you ever get the sense that Conflict Catcher was causing crashes? Or did you ever do a conflict test, and go through umpteen restarts, and it seemed like you were definitively and reproducibly narrowing down the cause of the crash to one culprit, but after the very last restart of the test, when everything had been disabled except the last suspect, you didn't get the crash/non-crash that you were expecting -- rendering the whole test worthless?
One trick I did with CC was a "reverse psychology" test: rather than using CC to determine which combination of extensions caused a crash, I would use it to determine which combination of extensions enabled a feature or a performance boost. But this type of test also often failed for the reasons mentioned above.
Automated conflict testing was a great concept that Conflict Catcher, in theory, should have done very well...
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Mission: Thunderbolt was/is a great game. I fired up Classic yesterday to play it again, for old-times sake. But I realized, I only have version 1.0. Does anyone know where I can get version 1.0.6? Share your memories about Mission: Thunderbolt here. I'll never forget the Icky Lumps, Giant Tentacular Horrors, Two-Headed Radioactive Swamp Creatures, Snagglepusses, Floating Eyes, Needlenoses, Bug-Eyed Monsters, Many-Armed Things......
[figz@figz figz]$ kill -9 `ps -ef | awk '$1=="figz" { print $2 }'`
Is there any place where I can buy a copy of Glider Pro X? I played Glider 4 long time ago and it's the reason I tried to get a Mac while I was still in middle school.
I don't think I ever saw a problem that was due to Conflict Catcher itself. Its automated search for extension conflicts was very effective, while doing this manually with Apple's Extensions Manager was a big chore. But of course, you had to have enough sense to know that the results were meaningless if your problem was not actually due to an extension conflict. And 3-way conflicts were still really difficult.