BBEdit 16
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#bbedit#updates#software#still#text#app#apple#don#doesn#cost
Discussion (59 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Today an individual license costs $60.
Wild how software pricing and sales models have changed, and good on bare bones for staying away from subscription pricing.
I, in fact, do NOT want continuous maintenance. Ever. I will literally never turn on auto-updates for the rest of my life.
1) Purchase a major version and get no updates.
2) Purchase a subscription and get constant updates.
Pay for the major version, get all of its updates. Then pay for update (to next major plus its updates) with a discount.
If you don't prefer the pay, you can keep what you have.
This is what BBEdit, Forklift, CameraBag and countless others do, and it works very well.
No, we should not praise software companies for hobbyist practices like selling $1 app on the App Store, which say, 30% goes to a digital distribution store, and then of your after distribution fees, about 20%+ percent goes to the federal and local government.
Pay for updates, and charge rightfully like you're supporting an engineer's salary, and that you have a commercial real estate lease to pay, and the compensation packages of full-time employees with benefits.
And boo people who say otherwise. No other professional field do I know of exists where cheap bastards abound while the entire industry is dependent on monopolies to pay the high wages of engineers.
We're talking about a macOS program, where companies don't have to bother with Apple's rules to sell their software, so your comment is off-topic.
Panic is good example of this kind of pricing.
Nova is $99 (last I checked), and gets updates for a year. After that, it's $75 for another year of updates.
If you don't want to update, you don't have to. You can even update every second or third year or whatever you want and catch up with all the missing features and updates.
Let's not just throw up our hands and say, "Oh, well. Apple makes me do this, so there's nothing I can do." Innovate.
If surgeons could wiggle their fingers and make a better scalpel, at no cost, and give a copy to all their friends, also at no cost, I bet they'd have some pretty spiffy scalpels going around soon and many docs would stop paying for them.
Amazingly, software does not have zero cost. You pay for hardware, software licensing, hosting, leases, fees, and administrative costs.
Where is this mythical no cost software you're talking about? Is it in the room with us right now?
Where does your income come from again? Is it this same zero cost software we're talking about right now? The same zero cost software that an employer pays you a salary and benefits for, or...?
Blacksmithing, metal working?
[1]: https://x.com/smorr/status/521033038713880576
[2]: https://www.barebones.com/company/press/bbedit_back_to_mas_p...
Siegel still manages it (I don't know if he is still the main coder). He never sold out.
Another nice thing is the ability to collect paths, line and column numbers from the output for navigation.
None of those things imply that it's broken or unusable. Still, it means it's going to feel like a dated app and that's not fun.
[0]https://www.barebones.com/support/yojimbo/archived_notes.htm...
I'm not familiar with macOS: Why would an application need to be updated for any of these? Were the existing APIs insufficient to integrate these?
For instance, an app can't start using Apple Intelligence if it's compiled with an older version of the SDK that doesn't know that such a thing exists. There are some UI exceptions, such as if the OS starts rendering high-level requests like "draw a button" in a newer style. Lots of other things take specific application support, though. MacOS 14 added desktop widgets. Unless an app adds code to configure and deploy widgets, that's not something the OS can do for it. That means that Yojimbo couldn't possibly offer widgets showing, say, the 5 most recently added documents.
If you're OK with not needing or wanting the newer features, and it doesn't rely on some old API that Apple deprecated, then sure, continue to use it! It's still a fine app. But each passing year means that all its updated competitors can do new things that it can't.
Barebones is great!
much love for them sticking with it for so long
Happily paid for every update for years, even when I used Emacs, I kept BBedit in reach. For quick text edits/transformations (because Regex in Emacs is hard to use). But with LLMs + nvim I hardly start bbedit anymore.
So now with LLMs, I tell them what I need and they write a shell/Perl/Python script to make the craziest transformations.
In BBEdit's case, I could see adding all your new tools as text filters to have a standard way for executing them, either through scripting or in a text window.
I'm sure some people will like this update, but it's a big meh for me. I'll wait for some further updates to upgrade.