Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.