Thursday, December 14, 2006

[Alert] MacHeist Bundle!!! (Updated)

If you'll forgive me for not posting something totally mac development related... I just thought since there was a Digg article earlier trying to rally people to this that I should do something and try and get the word out even further if I can Were just past the halfway point in the MacHeist Bundle sale if I heard correctly and NewsFire has been unlocked as we reached $50,000 donated to charity. Still many people are evidently holding out on waiting till TextMate is unlocked. Well people if you hold out it won't be unlocked! At the rate things are going I fear we'll be just under the $100,000 needed to unlock TextMate. It's not everyday you get insanely great Mac software for next to nothing and can donate money to charity all at the same time. Even if you don't want some of the software you can still give it to someone if you want. Personally myself I don't plan on giving up Vienna as I like having an Open Source RSS reader so at some point I will probably give NewsFire to someone. If you don't know what TextMate is you can go here or here and find out or download a demo. I've been testing it and I love it, even if it probably won't replace Xcode for most of my serious coding work, but I've been finding for XHTML, PHP, and the small C examples I do in my books it's a sweet tool to have. A bit of a misconception is that if you buy now you won't get TextMate, Im telling you if you buy now and MacHeist gets to $100,000 then you will be given it afterwards. Yes sometime soon i'll get my newsfire license even though I bought the bundle on the first day before NewsFire was unlocked (hey for Delicious Library, Disco and Rapidweaver alone it was more than worth the $49.) Spread the word or if you were thinking of getting it just get it now I promise you won't be disappointed. You'll even discover some great new stuff and feel good donating some money to worthy causes. I had never tried Pangea Arcade before I got this and normally I probably wouldn't have bought it, and yet it's sucked up a big chunk of my time for the last few nights playing a couple of the games. Chances are you'll probably find a app you didn't think would be worth it but now like. Much respect to all those involved in MacHeist! It seems like the rate of sales today is increasing slightly, but I know we can keep it up people! [Update] As I discuss in the comments I didn't mean to seem like im putting TextMate down which im certainly not, I really like the app and Im using it more and more lately as I get the time to use it. However for my inital tests with Xcode projects im finding it hard to use TextMate interchangeably with Xcode and Objective-C. I'd be happy to discuss the specifics later, however my job has me swamped right now so this will have to wait until next week.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any thoughts on Gruber's writeup?

http://daringfireball.net/2006/12/iniquities_of_the_selfish

Colin Wheeler said...

Wil Shipley himself thought this was ok and after reading his interview I agree with him. I think the drive of this thing is to get people introduced to the software so when vastly better versions are realeased later on you'll upgrade where Mac developers get their money.

The developers could have rejected this just as well, but they thought there was a benifet in getting people introduced later on.

Anything like this for the developers is a little risky, but at the same time I think i'll have huge benifets down the road... only time will tell though.

Anonymous said...

even if it probably won't replace Xcode for most of my serious coding work

Why, out of curiosity? From my perspective, Xcode is a great project management and modeling tool but TextMate is a great editor.

I admit this is mainly a rhetorical question. A number of people walked into the CocoaHead meeting last month with a very similar view as yours, and everyone either walked out a convert or at least reconsidered their stance.

Colin Wheeler said...

Why, out of curiosity? From my perspective, Xcode is a great project management and modeling tool but TextMate is a great editor.

Im not saying TextMate is a bad editor, but there were some minor quirks I had with it like after I discovered it had code completion it was ok, but didn't quite behave in a way i'd expect like Xcode/Visual Studio in the manner that you just type the space after the beginning of a message and immediately it presents all options which is sometimes nice to have, with TextMate you have to type something and then it presents a subset list of possible options and put those in a pop-up menu vs a nice scroll list like Xcode features. Furthermore when you do start typing in code completion it doesn't eliminate the options (again like in Xcode/Visual Studio) how you would expect code completion to behave, it just starts going down to the right option in a very long list. Correctly behaving code completion like that is a big thing to me. That and if I could set TextMate to do that automatically versus a key combo would just instatly raise my opinion of TextMate overnight.

Don't get me wrong, I am dead tired today from my Tech support job right now, but for me It seems like TextMate wants to mash Xcode functionality into itself when It should be the other way around for Cocoa projects. I'd want to plugin some of the great functionality from TextMate into the Xcode editor and have the best of both worlds there or If the above things were met I could definitely move more work over to TextMate. Then again there are things like debugging that TextMate isn't suited for right now. And partially it'd just feel easy and great to have Xcode auto open source code files with Textmate, but I haven't seen that in the preferences and that's really something for Apple to do.

Don't ge me wrong I am very willing to try new software and give it a fair chance andI haven't gotten nearly as much time as I'd like in with TextMate so maybe i'll find something that will change my perception around when I get some free time soon. But for now this is about as good as I can express why as good as TextMate is it still seems like it needs a bit of refining in code completion at least.

Anonymous said...

Xcode's editor does do a few things better than TextMate, but TexMate's advantages so vastly outstrip Xcode 2's editor overall that it's an easy decision for me.

I think the most important thing when you revisit TextMate is not to try to frame every code editing situation in an Xcode mindset. Explore TextMate's Objective-C, C and Source bundles and watch some of the screencasts.

If you're anything like most people, you'll realize that TextMate gives you completely new ways to approach code editing that save you ridiculous amounts of time.

 
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