Wednesday, November 28, 2018

SubEthaEdit 5.0 Goes Open Source

Dominik Wagner (tweet 2, Hacker News):

The new version 5 of SubEthaEdit, the Apple Design Award winning text editor for macOS, is now available free of charge in the App Store and as direct download. The complete source code with history going back 15 years is also available under the MIT License.

[…]

Marketing wise we shoehorned ourselves into the collaborative aspects, and failed to communicate the fact that SubEthaEdit was a great general purpose text editor of its own right.

[…]

Instead we got another lucky break. The great folks at Panic were planning their then secret Coda, and were looking for something they could base their editing engine on. And that influx of financial support was what enabled us to become a real working company.

[…]

The success of Carcassonne also had a somewhat unfortunate side effect for us: With still no real viable long term business story for SubEthaEdit it moved more and more on the back burner. We still maintained it and brought it up to the App Store eventually, but sadly it couldn’t prove its financial viability.

Gus Mueller:

So I sent a couple of the hardware discounts to the folks at Rogue Amoeba (makers of Audio Hijack) and the folks at the Coding Monkeys (who made SubEthaEdit). We were all pretty happy.

Then a few days later I got a call for ADC. “What the heck are you doing?” they asked. I said that I didn’t need that many and gave a couple of discounts to them. “Are they doing work for you or something? Because the Coding Monkeys have a student ADC account, and it’s not possible for them to have a hardware discounts and we’re going to transfer those back to you.”

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

Wow, this takes me back. I used it for a _long_ time, and miss the days when collaboration didn’t require insane web services...

"Then a few days later I got a call for ADC. “What the heck are you doing?” they asked. […] it’s not possible for them to have a hardware discounts and we’re going to transfer those back to you.”"

Now, we know where part of the App Review team is coming from.

Memories. I had that same hardware discount issue (and nerve-wracking phone call from Apple). I ended up having to create another non-student ADC account to which the hardware discount could be transferred. Between that and the annual at-MacHack hardware discounts (for which the student ones were actually more than the ADC ones), saved a LOT of money on a few years of Macs.

Leave a Comment