They way for him to win big, would be to drop the "only Mac" mantra and his "Mac rulez" _friends_/fanboys (like DHH himself). Textmate and it's author really have little to gain from restricting Textmate to one (tiny) platform. I am no fan of trademarks or patents being fiercely defended, nor a fan of Apple owning all of the apples in the cart (pun not originally intended), but from a totally objective point of view, I think it'd make sense for Apple, and if Allan were to turn down, say, a million dollars from Apple, he's a far more principled man than I! Apple is a fierce defender of its trademarks, and with TextMate under the Apple wing, it could become an even bigger driver for the OS X platform since copycat behavior could be restricted. There's nothing quite as good as iMovie, Pages, or Aperture in their respective niches either (although Adobe is trying on the last one). Even before iTunes was released on Windows, there was nothing as elegant and as usable. This doesn't happen with many Mac-only apps, and from what I've read, Allan isn't particularly interested in developing non-OSX versions of the software, so the developers of copycat editors like E-TextEditor are not to blame.Īpple tends to be very good at releasing products that people are afraid of copying too well. People from all platforms have seen TextMate and been captivated by it enough to the point that they lament the lack of its existence on their platform. Apple has even acknowledged this and are including Rails with Leopard. These points all demonstrate that TextMate has rapidly become a standard of its own in the text editor market, and it has undoubtedly help OS X become the de facto platform for Rails development. they've ended up actually buying a MacBook (or similar) after several months, and continue to rave about TextMate ( Jamie van Dyke is one example that sticks in my mind). 4) If you've been floating around the various freenode Ruby and Rails related channels in the past couple of years, you'll have undoubtedly seen at least several Windows or Linux users drop by raving about TextMate and lamenting their inability to buy a Mac. 3) There's even a 200 page book about TextMate on the market. 2) A few people have converted TextMate's snippets to operate in other editors. So why? 1) The E-TextEditor homepage mentions TextMate six times. If Allan isn't interested in selling it, then fine, but if he is, it could be a big win for both him and Apple. I can't speak on his behalf, so just take the following as editorial waffle, but I think Apple should buy TextMate and release it for free or at low cost (as currently). I don't know Allan Odgaard, the developer of TextMate, at all, but I'm a happy user of the editor, despite not understanding almost any of the advanced features. If you're a Windows user, give it a look. The initial reports I've read about it are that it's rather good, and after watching the screencast I'd say it looks to be a pretty good editor and I'd give it a try if if used Windows. Over at the O'Reilly Ruby Blog, Jim Alateras laments the recent stalling of development on RadRails, but suggests an alternative solution: E-TextEditor, a "TextMate" alternative for Windows.
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