fallenrogue.com

Look, this may be an unpopular comment but I’m just sick and tired of good developers being strong armed into doing things that they don’t want to do because it’s not “what i want”. When reading the comments in this article about Allan Odgaard’s choice to target the next major version of TextMate (IMO: the best text editor that money can buy on the Mac) at Leopard only I was appalled by the negative comments. It was like Allan just bitch-slapped their mothers and ran off with that new 50” LCD in the study.


Before I start ranting my brain out, I want you all to read what Allan had to say about the topic. Since I know people love to talk without reading I’m going to repost the good parts here.

First of all, 2.0 is a free upgrade, so I won’t miss out on any upgrade fees from people that want to stay on Panther or Tiger.


Secondly, roughly 90% of my users are early adopters and have in all likelihood upgraded to Leopard within a few months of its release, so by keeping compatibility with older operating systems I am catering to less than 10% of my users.


Thirdly, it has a significant cost to stay backwards compatible, this price is paid in the form of:

1. Time spent debugging (and sometimes making workarounds for) issues only present on the older OS version.


2. Time spent implementing stuff that Apple offers for free on the new version of the OS.


3. Not being able to make use of features only present on latest version of the OS when it’s too impractical to conditionally make use of them.


4. Code complexity, because it needs to do different things on different versions of the OS.

Between the flame comments in on both Allan’s blog and Arstechnica I decided that I actually do have opinion about this. It’s two fold.

1. If you’re using TextMate and love it and don’t want Leopard then those of you in that 10% have nothing to complain about. There’s a version for you. It works, it’s been testing in the wild and any new features will likely require an upgrade you’re not making anyway so you’re not missing a thing. No need to leave hateful comments to Allan. It’s his choice. Love it or… well… stay where you are. Don’t even have to leave it. Not. So. Bad.


2. Don’t be a hater. If Allan’s software is awesome and makes you more productive and you fall right in line with his view on his software development choices, great. If not, you’ve got a good working copy that will never go bad.

Look, this is unpopular but sometimes what’s best for the end user is not what’s in the best interest for the developer. And when you’re not a giant corporation who’s hell-bent on capturing every possible vertical market to ensure double digit growth you don’t cater to people who aren’t in the majority of your consuming base. 90% of his customers (myself included) are planning to be early adopters. Not just move to the next version, they’re gonna get it the first day it drops, what do you want him to do? Forget about those people just because a small fraction are refusing to migrate? From a business point of view it doesn’t make sense. There are plenty of people who aren’t going to move to Vista because of the high price of the OS (you know you don’t want the home version so don’t even say it.) if you have a product that you charge good money for, do you cater to the guys who aren’t going to let go of 120 bucks? Or do you go to the community that does, willingly for the best of the best in new features and functionality? From a dollars and cents perspective for Allan, the latter is perfect and since he, himself, is one of those in the latter category it works out for everyone! He develops on the latest platform for users of the latest platform. It’s what he wants to do. If you want something different then make your own TextMate. Call it TextFriend and do a bunch of Rails screencasts with it and undercut Allan’s price by 10 bucks and do it for System 8 to Leopard. Oh… don’t want to? Can’t? Then please, oh please, open the fat envelope containing your acceptance letter to STFU.


I switched to the Mac because there are passionate, independent developers out there with mainstream acceptance doing their thing on their terms. More to the point of why I feel so strongly about this comes in the form of a blog post I recently read. Another developer migrated all of the macros from TextMate to RadRails, a move of questionable ethics to be sure, but then rather than thank the man for his hard work, he belittles him and his product by saying that not developing a version of TextMate for Windows was “Just plain lazy”. REALLY? REALLY? You’re going with lazy? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me? So what you’re saying is, because a man found a platform that he really loves and a small but supportive audience that willingly pays for his software, because he won’t cave and completely overhaul his code base for an unappreciative and over-saturated market you brand him the lazy one? YOU WHO STOLE HIS HARD WORK AND DEMAND CREDIT HAVE THE NERVE TO CALL HIM LAZY? Shame on you. Shame on the development community for slandering a guy who has made their lives better. He’s free to do whatever he likes and if you don’t like it, you’ve totally got other options.


It’s tough to be sympathetic to the the 10% in this who are mainly lashing out due to feeling abandoned. But, if you’re like me, you’ve used TextMate to make money. I’ve certainly see the ROI on the 50 bucks I spent; 1000 fold. I love that software because Allan loves making that software and it shows. If I need to fork over 120 dollars to move to Leopard just do get some crazy feature for TextMate 2.0 I would gladly do it. Even if Leopard was a new desktop and a screen saver it would make the free upgrade to TextMate 2.0 STILL a wise investment. If that’s unacceptable to you, Vi on Ubuntu is still free.