Michael, who is much more knowledgeable of such things than I, has an overview of MacroMates’ newly-released TextMate, which purports to be a BBEdit killer. I downloaded and took a look at TextMate, too, and I was fairly unimpressed. If I weren’t using BBEdit, I would likely go with SubEthaEdit. I’ve been using BBEdit since, oh, 1996 or so, and version 8 is the best version yet of the ultra-powerful text editor. Like mi amigo, I won’t be cranking up TextMate any time soon for my own needs, but more power to MacroMates for going after the switcher market.
This has actually been bugging me since i first read about TextMate. Even before it was released, the fellow(s) at MacroMates were claiming it was going to be the best editor and would be a BBEdit killer.
Seriously, why do that? Yeah, you get some cheap publicity, but one of two things happens. Either you live up to your own hype or you don't.
If you live up to the hype, great. Congratulations. You gambled and won. The hype didn't make the app any better, though. I'm no marketing genius, but did the prerelease hype really help sell the product any more than the same post-release hype would have helped?
If you don't live up to the hype, then you've got problems. Your app's not being judged on it's merits as a 1.0 release; it's being compared to a well established and respected product.
The Mac development community isn't huge and a rep like this might be hard to shake. Whatever happened to under-promise and over-deliver?
Posted by: Eric Blair at October 7, 2004 12:15 AM
Great points, Eric. Also, I think the hype set up this odd expectation that it would appeal to BBEdit users (the way InDesign was supposed to make it easy to move away from Quark). After seeing the product, it seems clear that they were actually trying for something else entirely.
Posted by: Michael Tsai at October 7, 2004 6:18 AM
Erik, I think the hyping was largely done by people who were desperate for a new editor and they made it out to be their dream editor in their mind and passed on their illusion -- 2 of my beta testers did publicly state their enthusiasm for this editor before release, but I, the sole author of the thing, only put up a page to accept emails for a release announcement, and at this page I mentioned the features 1.0 would support, nothing more.
That said, no question about the editor was hyped (but not by me), so the question might be, was this a good or a bad thing? It's difficult to say, it let to _a lot_ of negative criticism only hours after the release -- but had their been no hype, would people even download it in the first place?
And today, almost a week after release, it seems to really have swayed people, e.g. read the reviews at MacUpdate: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/16157 or check the mailing list archives to see how much user activity there is around this editor.
One of the first persons to publicly criticize the editor is now a registered user, is working on a bundle editor for TextMate, and has submitted several (really great looking) mockups to how TextMate could visually be improved.
So in a way, I'm not sure it even was over-hyped -- as I see it, it had two major flaws, 1) that it was visually "boring" so it did not instantly appeal to people (and this includes not having a preferences window ;) ) and 2) it was not trying to clone an existing editor, but tried to do things in its own way, so people needed time to a) figure out how to use these new "concepts" and b) unlearn all their existing hot keys.
Posted by: Allan Odgaard at October 11, 2004 11:02 AM