The Old Guard of Mac Indy Apps Has Thrived For More Than 25 Years (macworld.com)

Glenn Fleishman, writing for MacWorld: It seems like it was only yesterday that I first used BareBones Software's BBEdit, but in actuality, yesterday is so far away -- 25 years, in fact. With all the twists and turns across more than two decades of Apple as a company, Mac hardware, and the underlying operating system, you might think that BBEdit stands alone as a continuously-developed app shepherded largely or exclusively by the same independent developer -- an app without a giant company behind it. As it turns out, BBEdit is one of several apps that's been around the block more than a few times.

The longevity of indie apps is more extraordinary when you consider the changes Apple put the Mac through from the early 1990s to 2018. Apple switched from Motorola 680x0 processors to PowerPC to Intel chips, from 32-bit to 64-bit code, and among supported coding languages. It revved System 7 to 8 to 9, then to Unix across now 15 major releases (from 10.0 to 10.14). That's a lot for any individual programmer or small company to cope with. Bare Bones's head honcho, Rich Siegel, and the developers behind three other long-running Mac software programs shared with me their insight on development histories for over 25 years, what's changed the most during that time, and any hidden treasures users haven't yet found. You can hear more on BareBones Software's in this recent episode of The Talk Show, a podcast by DaringFireball's John Gruber.

Comments

Re:Wow!

[slashdice]

There's plenty of win32, VMS, Unix, z/OS, etc. software that's still actively developed 30 years later.

30th Annivery NeXTCube

[Anonymous Coward]

We're not too far away from the 30th anniversary of NeXT.

Apple should make a commemorative system for all NeXT fans.

What's your wish list for the new NeXTCube?

Re:30th Annivery NeXTCube

[drinkypoo]

What's your wish list for the new NeXTCube?

Unfuck the Dock. The Dock was always an annoying use of screen real estate when it was at the side of a 4:3 ratio display. You really wanted it at the bottom. But then we moved to 16:9 ratio displays, where there's plenty of room at the side of the display, so what does Apple do? MOVE IT TO THE BOTTOM. Not just that, but when the Dock was pinned to the upper-right, it was in a predictable location. But now that it's in the center-bottom, it grows in both directions, so everything on it moves every time any new element is added. It eliminates the benefits of muscle memory, making using your computer slower. On Windows you can throw the mouse into the appropriate corner and whack the mouse button to pop up the menu that you use to do everything. On MacOS, that only pops up the menu that you use to do some things. Apple is known for being the masters of UI, but they're actually worse at it than even Microsoft.

Back in the old days.

[Cmdln Daco]

Back in the old days, the most ardent Mac enthusiasts pooh-poohed unix. This was back when Apple was blowing many millions of dollars on their 'next generation Mac OS' which was a flop. Apple's developers really aren't good enough to produce a robust preemptive multitasking OS. They ended up just piggybacking on unix.

Speaking to third party Apple developers, they have always been a captive group. The tools back in the 90's were expensive and you had to pretty much be a club member to do much at all.

Re:Back in the old days.

[Cmdln Daco]

To prevent people from thinking that an SE/30 was a complete joke because there was only MacOS to run on it?

Re:Back in the old days.

[mfnickster]

It's been speculated that Apple only provided a version of Unix to comply with requirements for obtaining government contracts.

But I do recall a number of Mac proponents asserting that the GUI was vastly superior to command-line, and that Unix was a dinosaur.

Jef Raskin, founder of the Macintosh project, said at one point: "We have a whole valley full of people talking UNIX versus MS-DOS. What do you need any of that for? Just throw it all out; get rid of all that nonsense. Maybe you need it for computer scientists, but for people who want to get something done, no. Do you need an operating system? No."

Re:Back in the old days.

[mfnickster]

Yeah, the Cat was a failure, but it did kind of prove his point.

"Canon, possibly because the moribund Electronic Typewriter Division had been given the task, failed to market the product effectively, and it is now a dead cat.

"How in the world do you sell something that's different? That's the biggest problem. The world's not quite ready to believe. It's like in the early days at Apple, they said, 'What's it good for?' We couldn't give a really good answer so they assumed the machine wasn't going to sell. But I do know the way I plan to sell my product is by word of mouth. Some people will try it and say, 'This product really gets my job done. It doesn't have fifteen fonts. I can't print it out in old gothic banners five feet long, but I sure got that article finished under the deadline.' That's how I can sell it. Later, people will understand it.

"One of the prophets of the personal computer industry, Alan Kay, has said that the true personal computer has not yet been made. I disagree. We have, as the ancient curse warns us, gotten what we asked for. We do indeed have computers being bought by individuals for themselves; they are 'personal computers'. The problem is that many of us didn't want computers in the first place—computers are merely boxes for running programs—we wanted the benefits that computer technology has to offer. What we wanted was to ease the workload in information related areas much as washing machines and vacuum cleaners ease the workload in maintaining cleanliness.

"By choosing to focus on computers rather than the tasks we wanted done, we inherited much of the baggage that had accumulated around earlier generations of computers. It is more a matter of style and operating systems that need elaborate user interfaces to support huge application programs. These structures demand ever larger memories and complex peripherals. It's as if we had asked for a bit of part-time help and were given a bureaucracy."

Re:Wow!

[Red_Forman]

Did those platforms have three major CPU architecture changes, two completely different OS core and a 32-to-64-bit upgrade path in the last three decades?

I think what the parent A/C meant to say is that despite all the work required, some people want to make their software available for Mac.

Oh really....

[SuperKendall]

Windows has long supported ARM and Itanium.

How much indie Windows software added ARM and Titanium support?

ALL Mac indie software has (by necessity) followed Apple through architecture and pretty dramatic OS changes, especially in terms of frameworks (Windows programming has evolved, but is Windows programming today really so different from older Win32 development)?

Re:Oh really....

[ChatHuant]

ALL Mac indie software has (by necessity) followed Apple through architecture and pretty dramatic OS changes, especially in terms of frameworks

It would be more correct to say some indie software has followed Apple despite all the changes.

is Windows programming today really so different from older Win32 development)

I'm perplexed that you appear to think this is an issue. On the contrary, I see the concern for consistency and the care about backward compatibility as huge advantages of the Win32 platform over the Apple offering, both for programmers and for users.

Good people

[notthepainter]

I remember, way back in the day, putting together a mac for a broke friend of mine. Another friend knew one of the owners of Bare Bones, made a phone call, and they donated a color monitor to the project. Class act all around. (And yeah, to this day I'm still a customer!)

More than BBEdit

[david.emery]

I've been using GraphicConverter and DefaultFolder since Mac OS 7 on PowerPC (and I think even back to 68000.) DefaultFolder, in particular, had to be redesigned from the ground up a couple years ago not because of change of processor, but due to changes in how Mac OS X handles security features and system extensions.

Although it's not old enough to make "the old guard", I'm a huge fan of Aquamacs, a very well done EMACS port/reworking to be consistent with the Apple user interface. (Real EMACS beats BBEdit any day, IMHO.)

Re:BBEdit

[QuietLagoon]

When I used to carpool with some other software engineers, we had one rule for the ride: it was not allowable to talk about religion, politics or editors.

Re:Wow!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you any idea of the history behind the *nixes? Apparently not.
But if you want to take a look a a similar product: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)
It has been in development for more than 25 years and is inspired/based on an even older editor (vi, from 1976). Ran on a lot of now dead OSes / hardware and it still alive on lots of operating systems.

Unix programs, yes

[raymorris]

> Did those platforms have three major CPU architecture changes, two completely different OS core and a 32-to-64-bit upgrade path in the last three decades?

Yes, in the case of Unix. In fact most of the old Unix programs supported three different CPU architectures *simultaneously*. Instead of version 1.0 supporting one architecture and version 4.0 supporting a different architecture, all versions supported all architectures. They did so partly by using some *simple* abstractions so that the applications mostly didn't care what the CPU architecture was. (Complex abstractions can make these things harder, simple abstractions make them easier).

Two different "OS core" - yep, completely changed out the entire kernel. Most Unix software runs fine on any of three or four different kernels. Originally Unix, then most switched over to Linus's Not Unix (Linux), and they run fine on MacOS, which is derived from an old Unix. Again simultaneously - the developers didn't have to switch. Simple abstractions like "everything is a file" mean the application doesn't care which kernel is providing fopen(). The application only cares that some kernel allows reading and writing of files. Since everything is a file, fopen(), read(), and write() let you do whatever you want in the system.

"32-to-64-bit upgrade path"? Linux supported x64 before x64 hardware existed. At the same time, the same version of the kernel supported 32 bit, and someone even rannitnon an 8 bit processor.

Great Mac Shareware

[JBMcB]

GraphicsConverter - basically a GUI version of ImageMagick - could open absolutely anything, and pretty damn fast at it

SoundApp - GraphicConverter for sound files. It was the only thing fast enough to play high quality MP3s on my old PowerMac 6100

Fetch - THE FTP client. Only thing I've used that's even close to being as simple and clean is FileZilla

PlayerPro - All in one MOD file player with cool as hell spectrum analyzers, oscilloscopes, per-track VU meters...

Stuffit Expander / Compressor / ShrinkWrap - Open any archive or disk image file and do pretty much anything with it - the coolest thing is you could (trivially) script it to automatically expand something, drop the archive into one folder, then put the contents in another folder depending on the file type.

ZTerm - Dialup client with Zmodem - essential for BBSes

NIH Image - Freeware image editing software designed to do medical imaging analysis - but it had all kinds of crazy filters and color modification algorithms that let you do Photoshop-style color channel operations for free

Realmz - Massive tile-based role playing game with tons of character options, weapons and gear

I’m a satisfied customer

[93 Escort Wagon]

Back when they charged over a hundred bucks for the software, I did wonder who the heck pays that much for a text editor. But eventually they started offering a free “lite” version (originally the lite version was cheaper, but not free) - and I found that to be really handy. After several years of using BBEdit Lite and then TextWrangler (they rebranded the free one), I decided to buy BBEdit - not because I needed the additional features, but to support the company.

A lot of well-known Mac companies have bit the dust over the past decade (we hardly knew ye, FreeVerse)... but it’s nice that there are still a few stalwarts like BareBones and Omni left.

Re:I’m a satisfied customer

[93 Escort Wagon]

You can actually run BBedit for free now - you basically get the TextWrangler feature set in that case. You can choose to pay them for the "premium" features, or not - but in either case you run the same app.

Yes! GraphicsConverter!

[King_TJ]

Interesting little recent story with that one....

My workplace recently had a challenge. Our Finance dept. had been using a couple of Windows software applications made by EMC for the purpose of scanning in, indexing and providing view access to checks and invoices. Back when all of these were first set up, EMC allowed people to license them individually and use them as "building blocks" for your own document handling solutions. We hired a consulting firm to make them work in tandem with the Great Plains accounting package.

Since then, it seems that EMC has become more focused on selling them as a bundled document management solution. Problem is? As we've upgraded Windows past 7 and on to 10, it broke compatibility with these programs. On the server side, we can't even do all of the latest . NET upgrades or security patches without it causing problems. The cost to pay for the upgrades and support licenses to get current versions of the tools is way more than we can justify for what we do with them. So we decided to migrate to a new solution.

The first big stumbling block to migration was exporting all of our existing scanned images. Apparently, a really oddball version of TIFF was implemented in the EMC software and nothing else was able to open the files. We we able to contact GraphicsConverter's author and he took up the challenge of reverse engineering the file format and adding support to his software package. Thanks to that effort, we could finally set up a batch conversion using GraphicsConverter!

IMO, it really is the premiere application out there, regardless of OS platform, for viewing and working with just about ALL image formats out there. If his software can't work with it, he's willing to make it happen -- even this long after developing the product.

Re:Yes never saw the draw

[hawk]

>For me one draw of the Mac was how easy it was to run Emacs on it. Once you know
>Emacs well, it's pretty hard for any other editor to pull you away.

No kidding.

Every time I try, my cat disappears, my bank accounts get frozen, and mysterious messages threatening the cat flicker across the screen until I reload EMACS and enter M-C-A-uncle! and then C-M-purge-competing-editors-with-extreme-prejudice.

My dog used to disappear, too, but I had too many typos on the last command, and never saw him again . . .

hawk

Re:Wow!

[Applehu Akbar]

Just goes to show how much better Apple is than anything else. No other platform/company has a history of community and development that is as rich and long lasting.

The one big thing Apple did better than anyone else was deploy a Unix-based operatimng system that users and developers both like. It's the OS that Linux might have become had it not been for all that poisonous bickering and fragmentation.

Re:Wow!

[TheRaven64]

This sort of attidude is why the fuckwits at GNOME want to kill off middle click paste. Even though Apple have a crap version that only works in the terminal. but because Apple only have a crap version, Linux should too!

Huh? Apple doesn't have middle-click paste, it has command-v paste everywhere. The main thing I miss about macOS on other platforms is having the same copy and paste shortcuts in the terminal as everywhere else. Other platforms (including crappy X11 DEs that originated on '90s PCs, but not proper UNIX DEs that originated on machines that had a meta key) decided to overload Control-C for paste and therefore made something incompatible with any environment that uses control key combinations for sending control codes.