Tuesday, December 13, 2011

TextMate 2.0 alpha is out

Things that did NOT make it into the alpha:
  • Split views: Yes, I actually had this on the alpha milestone, I’m not overly excited about this feature myself, but I know it’s a very common request, so eventually it should find its way into the application.
  • Full screen mode: This is mainly because we are hesitant to go Lion-only so we are holding back with “lionizing” TextMate till we feel confident we can fully drop backwards compatibility.
  • Performance: Overall performance is fine, but there are still edge-cases that we haven’t looked into, for example the long lines issue which also exists in 1.x or opening files that exhaust TextMate’s memory space.
  • Bundle editor: While a proof-of-concept bundle editor is included, it is provisional, has some flaws, and not how we envision the final bundle editor to be.
  • Settings: Not everything in the Preferences window has an effect at the moment and several menu settings are not sticky, some even revert when switching tabs. Those can be set via .tm_properties — more about this in an upcoming post.

Update: I, for one, can't actually start it. It crashes upon load.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Lack of excitement for Pharo 1.4 seems symptomatic

Here's Lukas Renggli, the working horse that pulls Smalltalk behind him, announcing his plans for Pharo 1.4, or his lack thereof:
Just to repeat myself: With Pharo 1.4 having uncountable changes in core parts of the system and with the system including more and more forked and increasingly incompatible versions of packages (AST, RB, FS, Shout, Regex, …) I am unwilling to go through the same pain as with Pharo 1.3 again. In the current state, I don't see any of the code I am involved with (including Seaside, Magritte, Pier, OB, PetitParser, …) to move forward. I suspect that moving to another development platform soon causes less pain than to move to adopt the next Pharo :-(
In a word, nobody wants to upgrade to new versions of Pharo. But that was the whole point of Pharo: progress, moving ahead. There isn't a Smalltalk with traction right now. You can watch the Smalltalk community fail to answer which part of the Smalltalk universe is worth looking at at Stackoverflow.
Compare this with the spirit in the Objective-C/Cocoa world:
It’s OK to support only the newest version of iOS.
Now, you might say that this isn't a fair comparison, because writing iOS apps is the key to a new and exciting and fast-growing market, the mobile platform. But I think that's the same argument that Eric Schmidt is getting wrong about Android: “Whether you like Android or not, you will support that platform”. As Gruber points out, he's having cause and effect backwards: developers love programming for iOS, and only therefore is iOS as exciting as it is.
Smalltalk simply isn't as inviting to developers as it used to be.

Monday, December 5, 2011

I'm thru with the GPL

Free software is great. Seeing your own project being used and maintained by somebody else is great, too. But being expunged from the version history is a really bitter thing to experience. I'm moving my projects to Apache License, which requires attribution.