Early in the last decade, the number of requests we got for a Mac version started to increase dramatically.  One of our developers at the time was particularly afraid he would be chosen to do this work because he had some Mac experience – but he really didn’t want to.  Naturally, he came in one morning to discover on his desk an old Mac SE30 that used to be used for something around here (I believe it was used to print out labels for floppy disks) sitting on his desk with a Mac OSX CD hanging out of the floppy disk drive and a note that read “[Developer name changed to protect their identity] – see me – Clark”.  (Note to our new users: SlickEdit has been around long enough that it used to ship on floppy disks) (Note to users under 30 – USB sticks did not always exist).

The prevailing wisdom at the time was that it would be easy for us to do a Mac version, “because it’s just UNIX now, and you guys are UNIX already – it’ll just be another port”.  I remember hearing this over and over at trade shows in between requests for Ruby support, and “Do you guys have any free t-shirts?” (Right now, there’s a guy in his basement inventing a new scripting language, convinced his will be the one that will take over the world, obsoleting all other scripting languages.  I really wish somebody would stop him, because it won’t take over and obsolete all other scripting languages, but it will become just popular enough we will have to support it.  When I say “stop him”, I don’t mean hurt him or anything – just take him out to dinner or introduce him to a woman).

It turns out the “It’s just UNIX now” logic is a bit, what’s the word I’m looking for…. wrong.  There is UNIX under there, and obviously that was a good place to start when they revamped MacOS.  Plus, I can get a console window which was always my complaint about Macs “back in the day” (yes, I know you could install something, I maintain it should just be there).  But what the fact that “It’s just UNIX now” got us was the ability to create an X11 application that would run on the Mac.  So we did that – and customers loved it.  Well, that isn’t exactly true.  They acted more like we gave them a new BMW but first used it for one of those things you see at the county fair where you pay a dollar and get to hit a car with a sledgehammer (granted they usually do this with demolition derby cars, not new BMWs).  It was SlickEdit – it worked, but it just didn’t look or feel like people expected it to. Hardcore SlickEdit fans were happy… ish.  They were happy to have SlickEdit, but they missed all the Mac-isms, and were a little perturbed by SlickEdit’s menu being attached right to the top of the application window.

So, starting sometime in 2010 our CTO began the process of exploring how to get us a native version on the Mac – and the GUI overhaul that ensued stayed largely in his office until sometime this past spring when different team members began to have certain controls assigned to them to port to our new GUI framework (I’m not going into which one here, the evidence is “out there”).  I was able to be part of this process, and it was very interesting work.  It is an exciting time to work here at SlickEdit.

We had a nice long beta test – a little longer than we planned. I would like to take a moment to say that our beta testers were some of the best we’ve ever dealt with.  Even when there were problems, the comments almost always went something like “It crashed, but thanks for doing a native Mac version, great work, looking forward to the next version!”.  The beta testers this time were aces – some of them old SlickEdit fans we’ve known for a while, and I believe we made some new friends too.  Thanks guys.

So, our native Mac version is “out there” now.  We hope everybody likes it.  Typically I haven’t been a big Mac fan, but I’m learning to appreciate the things that it does well.  I only wish I could get a few people to join me in an Indiana Jones like quest to track down the eleven remaining single button mice on the planet and then Ctrl+Click could work properly.

If you bought any of our X11 versions on the Mac you can get the new version for free. Here’s the link,or you can give our sales team a call at (919) 473-0070.

Last week we released our first public beta of SlickEdit v16.1 for Mac. This version replaces our previous iterations that used the X11 windowing system. Although we are using a cross-platform UI library which uses Cocoa for UI, and we’re writing quite a bit of our own Cocoa code for other Mac features like the Services menu, it doesn’t look like every other Mac application. And there are reasons for that.

SlickEdit is an MDI application
While there are some very well known applications that support a multiple document interface on the Mac, there is no real standard for how they should look and feel. Each application has a slightly different interpretation. As such we have chosen to keep our MDI implementation very close to what we have used in recent versions.

SlickEdit does a lot
This mostly affects how we present our application configuration options. Most Mac applications have a relatively small Preferences pane, perhaps with half a dozen categories, and a half-page screen of options for each category. But SlickEdit has 20+ years worth of features and configuration settings. Developers come to SlickEdit from a wide variety of editing environments, and our users want to be able to mold the application to their tastes.

SlickEdit is not just for the Mac
Like all multi-platform software, we have to make trade-offs between what might look best for a particular operating system, and what makes the most sense for a feature that needs to work on all of the supported platforms. There is also quite a bit of bias toward keeping functionality and appearance consistent with what long-time customers want and expect. SlickEdit has always placed a premium on letting you work with multiple languages on disparate platforms without having to retrain your brain and fingers. When implementing and tweaking features, we are constantly evaluating what a Mac user would expect, and what a SlickEdit user (regardless of platform) would expect.

SlickEdit will continue to evolve
While we do want to keep our product familiar across platforms, we aren’t going to be sitting stock still. While our immediate focus for the Mac is improvements to Objective-C language support, and better interoperability with Xcode project formats, we are looking forward to changes we can make in the user interface to improve effectiveness and efficiency. Getting this first non-X11 release ready was a big effort. And now that it’s almost done, we’re looking forward to making it the best it can be. We’re excited, and we hope that you will be too.

If you haven’t yet taken a look at SlickEdit 2011 for Mac, we invite you download our most recent beta version.

We’ve just released our first major update for SlickEdit 2011. And for some reason, point releases seem to me to be the oddest phase of the software life cycle. It doesn’t seem like that big a deal on the surface. You fix some bugs, polish a few features, and sneak in some customer requests. You run regression tests and sanity checks, then release it into the wild. But a service pack release is not really all that simple. (more…)