Fraser Speirs on Nice Software (he was kind enough to include SuperDuper! in the list):
...I also think it’s much harder to impart that serious ‘weightiness’ in something that doesn’t really have a physical aspect beyond the CD it comes on. Actually, the product packaging can play a part in my attitude to software. If the box looks serious and has the right texture and weight, I’m already better disposed to it.
He’s absolutely right: it is harder to give a product “presence” these days, especially when you’re “just” selling licenses on the Web. With Shirt Pocket, I’ve tried to concentrate on usability and support—key differentiators in the software market. I also try to make our products do one “pocket-sized” thing, and do it exceptionally well… and that means a lot of time spent polishing the software and the documentation.
These are all things I did in my previous companies, too, but we would also spend an enormous amount of effort—not to mention money—on the packaging of that content.
BRIEF, for example, had two enclosed Wire-O bound manuals, on paper of significant weight, along with a tri-fold Quick Reference Card, all packaged in a nice slipcase. The graphics were printed using a high quality process, and sealed with a matte plastic film: we knew the documentation was going to be used, and we wanted to make sure it held up well, and looked good in an office. As I recall, this cost us a huge amount per-product. But we were able to charge $195 a seat, and wanted to deliver $195 of value to the user. And —whenever they picked it up—our users got a “nice” feeling from the quality materials and presentation.
The same went for Track Record, although the size of the documentation made a slipcase impractical. Instead, we used the same kind of enclosed binding in a “candy box”, with a separate “How Do I?” guide that was designed with individually cut-back pages that acted as an “index”. Less expensive to produce, but still very “nice”. (Interestingly, when we were acquired, one of the first things Compuware/NuMega did—other than remove the space between “Track” and “Record”—was cut back on the quality of the materials… and raise the price.)
It’s something I miss, actually: the physical embodiment of the work we all put into our software. A giant box full of air and a CD just doesn’t do it for me…
14 Feb 2006 at 07:57 pm | #
Oh my! You’re still around! The BRIEF guy. Still coding too. Fantastic.
Hello Dave.
My name is Paul Mitchell. We met once, long ago, at a trade show, so don’t even try to remember me.
I was just thinking about you. Well, not you, more BRIEF, which made me think of you and try to find you. Not sure why - I’ve just have this nagging idea in my head for the past few months.
Sigh. I miss BRIEF. I still write lots of code and I can’t afford Visual Slickedit, so for code editing I’m using Kate (on KDE) and Crimson Editor on Win. My main problem is with these damned browser INPUT boxes like the one I’m using now.
As a blogger, I’m writing shedloads of simple HTML, primarily in the browser. All I want is a simple tag text editor that I can integrate but I haven’t yet seen one that I liked, so my head is nagging me to write one and I just don’t have the time.
So, hey, why not ask an expert? Do you know of anything that can help?
Macs. Been lusting after one. Any good, these days? Like most coders, I want god-like power with a simple, idiot-proof interface. Would a Mac satisfy me?
17 Feb 2006 at 03:24 pm | #
Hey, first, sorry it took me a while to reply—something weird is going on, and I’m not getting informed about all comments. Hm.
Anyway…
There’s one browser I’m familiar with that will potentially help: OmniWeb. It’s Mac-only, and one of its nice features is a “form expansion” mode, which actually takes a little multi-line edit field like this one and opens it in its own window. But, of course, its own window is not the same as “in your favorite editor”.
But there are quite a few nice editors under OSX, including TextWrangler (which is free), BBEdit, TextMate, etc. In fact, a “cross-grade” from TextWrangler to the full BBEdit costs something like $99, so you can really get “the big guy”, should you like it, for under $100.
It’s not BRIEF, of course, but what is?
Regarding the Mac, I’ve been really happy with it for the four or five years I’ve been on the platform reasonably exclusively. (I haven’t written any PC code for almost six years, hard to believe.) Is everything perfect on the Mac? Of course not. But I think you might find it to your liking, and a Mac mini—which you can experiment with—is less than $500… and it makes a great little almost-silent media server should you like things and want to trade up later!
19 Feb 2006 at 07:35 am | #
Hi Dave,
Thanks for the reply. Lots to look at, unashamedly Mac, you’re just encouraging me, aren’t you? Each new page I visit, I get a stronger feeling that my desk, and my life, are missing something. I keep having to dab the corners of my mouth. Is that normal?
OmniWeb sounds interesting, in that it seems to be approaching the browser from a HCI perspective, which is my primary interest, and something I’m depending upon. Modern mainstream web browsers, even my favoured Firefox, are still primitive and little more than green-screens. None I have used thus far are sufficiently different from Mosaic to warrant my trust as an application platform, despite their wide use as such.
For instance, modern browsers do not seem to treat me with the respect I deserve. I recently lost two hours of typing into a TEXTAREA with a brain-fart, Firefox slavishly obeying my command to close and forget my work, without so much as an “Are you sure, dummy?!” Every browser I’ve used does the same, and I think it’s a bit <q>Catch-22</q>. My text was for an application, so not the responsibility of the browser, yet applications have no control, as the TEXTAREA is a browser responsibility.
What does OmniWeb do in that situation? Specifically, after typing into a TEXTAREA for two hours, before submitting the form, I irrationally ask the computer to shut down, realising my error milliseconds after making it.
TextWrangler, being free, will be a day zero download should a nice, clean Mac ever have the pleasure of finding its way into my grubby hands. I would expect to be coding from day one.
The Mac Mini is the object of my desires, despite it being more expensive in the UK. No idea if the UK link below will work, as I had to remove a lot of ugly computer stuff from it. The comparison <q>high-street</q> price is £430, which at current rates is ~$750.
USA: http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,119387,00.asp
UK: http://www.pcworld.co.uk/martprd/store/pcw_page.jsp?page=Product&sku=552185
Regarding BRIEF, when I met you at that trade show, we spoke about it. At that time you were using Visual SlickEdit, which I think I had also discovered, was using and continued to use happily for many years. What is your favoured editor these days?
Could you tell me a little bit about working with XCode, please? I have no idea what it is, but being a coding tool is likely something I will use. I’ll read through your blog to find out more in the meantime, as you mention it in some posts, but a coder-to-coder summary would be welcome.
19 Feb 2006 at 09:47 am | #
OmniWeb does try to add HCI components to the base level “WebKit” functionality built into OSX, but it doesn’t protect you from the brain fart you mention, unfortunately. (Although most browsers will prompt if you have multiple tabs open, and a terrible workaround could be to always have an extra tab so you’ll get prompted.)
It does, however, do a great job saving open windows, tabs, etc, restoring things nicely when you restart. Text areas, though, no.
The vast majority of my coding is done right in XCode, which is the free IDE that comes with every Mac. It’s a blessing and a curse, as are most IDEs, with the editor being particularly “meh”. Editors are clearly kind of “the thing we’ve got to do to make an IDE an IDE”, and a lot of attention is paid to things like code completion, but less on the HCI factors that made BRIEF a good editor. But, it works.
XCode’s biggest problem is that it’s unwieldy. It’s built on top of the GNU toolchain, and—compared to Visual Studio—it’s somewhat primitive in a lot of areas. But it’s been getting better every release, and I find it a decent environment to work in.
What makes the Mac great, from a developer standpoint, are the terrific frameworks, specifically Cocoa. It’s positively fun, once you get your head around Cocoa, to bring up Mac apps, and XCode’s issues fade into the background when you work with something as well designed as Cocoa itself.
Anyway, as far as editors go, none of them are BRIEF, so it’s difficult for me to embrace any wholeheartedly. (Hard to believe that BRIEF got sold sixteen years ago. Sixteen!) I actually find it easier to not think about the way BRIEF works at all any more—I don’t try to emulate it, and just accept whatever the “default mode” is for a given editor. No sense trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
So, that said, there’s a lot of really good work in BBEdit (the big brother to TextWrangler). SubEthaEdit has some very interesting group editing concepts in it. And a more limited upstart, TextMate, gets good notices, but is significantly less mature. (To some, that’s an advantage, because you can watch it constantly change and get things that an editor like BBEdit already has.)
19 Feb 2006 at 03:13 pm | #
My brain-fart appears to have exposed a gaping hole in the UI design of the internet, which is hardly surprising as no such thing exists! I like your workaround, but if I can forget something important like saving my work, I would certainly forget to keep a tab open to protect me.
I think a Firefox plug-in may be in order, that looks out for important TEXTAREAs, monitors for change and blocks window closure if any is made. Not sure if all those things are possible for a plug-in, but the concept is simple enough.
Your description of XCode is so good, I can almost feel my way around it already. I’m old-school and comfortable with the toolchain idea, so although I’m not that familiar with the Gnu system, I know enough of it from Linux to be confident of being able to work with it. I’ve never expected much from IDE editors, so never been disappointed. However, Cocoa? Is that Apple’s latest application framework? I’ve never been a Mac-head, so could you give me a similar summary?
For pro editing, thanks for the BBEdit recommendation. I’ll be sure to check it out.
As to blog editing, I’m currently convincing myself that it would be fun to design and write a simple editor for tagged and other structured text, sufficient to replace TEXTAREAs where tagged text input is expected. I don’t need a toolbar, WYSIWYG maybe, but decent editing features definately. I can build in my brain-fart protection! I know that someone, somewhere must have done something, but I love to code, and often do so quicker than I find other people’s stuff. It’s just a matter of fitting in time for it all!
Btw, a niggle with your blog. My personal details Iemail and URL) seem to be reset to yours when I preview my comment. I have “Remember my personal information” selected. I’m using Firefox on Linux/KDE.
19 Feb 2006 at 03:24 pm | #
While Cocoa is pretty new to the Apple world, it was around in much the same form as the NeXTStep frameworks. Which should be no surprise, as OS X borrows quite heavily from NeXTStep.
Cocoa is one of the APIs that your program against under OS X. It’s a highly refined, elegant piece of work, whose patterns—once you get your head around them—are logical and easy to understand. The learning curve is steep—much as it is with an editor, right?—but once you get over the hump things fall into place quite nicely.
Coding is done in Objective-C, an interesting hybrid of standard C a more “smalltalk-like” dynamic OO language. Objective-C is also quite nice, and—even though lightweight—is extremely powerful and flexible.
Cocoa and Objective-C go hand in hand: the capabilities of Objective-C enable the elegance of Cocoa.
That’ll get you started, hopefully.
(Regarding the “remembered” values, I’ve heard that before. If you register for the blog and log in, it’ll work properly… it’s an unfortunate, strange bug in Expression Engine...)
22 Feb 2006 at 06:06 am | #
NeXT! Another drool-box I recall from the old days. Display PostScript. I so miss not having had a chance to play with it - a real page-based computer system.
Thanks for the head-up on Cocoa and Objective-C. I expect a fairly steep learning-curve when I step over (should that be up?) to the Mac - the “Trials of Job(s)”! I always did, which is mostly the reason I have not. Now I have the skills and soon the time to make the transition in a way that does justice to both the platform and myself, so I’m looking forward to it.
Objective-C may not be too much of a leap for me. I’m working with PHP at the moment, also a hybrid C-derived “object-oriented” langauge, also extremely powerful and flexible, but interpreted. As to Smalltalk, the only Smalltalk programmer I ever worked with was very odd but very nice, and I have avoided the language ever since he described it to me! Now that I too am very odd and very nice, perhaps I’ll get Smalltalk. So long as it’s nothing like Perl.
22 Feb 2006 at 07:23 am | #
Oh, Objective-C is nothing like Perl, believe me. I think you’re in for some fun.