TextMate is arguably the most influential text editor ever made. Among the numerous features it popularized are:

1. Abbreviation-Based Snippets
2. Auto-Paired Characters
3. Fuzzy-Finding by Filename

These features have all since been built-in to every subsequent popular text editor. In addition, the scope selectors and theming implementation that TextMate pioneered form the basis of themes, syntax highlighting, and scoping language-specific functionality in every subsequent popular text editor.

That’s already an impressive list of features to all stem from a single app, especially one that entered an already mature category, and we haven’t even gotten to TextMate’s greatest influence: TextMate was the first popular text editor to be built around extensions. It’s this change that would entirely re-shaped text editor market forever, solidify the niche status of every text editor that came before it, and pave the way for the eventual dominance of Visual Studio Code, more than a decade later. Based on how subsequent text editors have all been built around TextMate’s use of extensions, it’s fair to call Sublime Text, Atom, and VS Code, “TextMate-likes”.

Gus Mueller has my favorite take on the news that Apple plans to announce the transition to their own ARM chips at WWDC. Of the various predictions people are throwing around, the only one Mueller gives any credence to is the prospect that ARM Macs will only running sandboxed apps¹:

Assertion: ARM Macs will only allow sandboxed app.

This could happen. I give it a 50/50 shot at happening. Personally, I hope it doesn’t happen as there are still many problems with the sandbox on MacOS that have yet to be resolved, even though developers have been complaining about it for years.

Personally, I do not think that this is going to happen. In my overview of creative apps, I was stunned at how ineffectual sandboxed software has been. I keep a mental list of applications that aren’t sandboxed that the Mac absolutely cannot afford to lose, here’s the list²:

• Ableton Live
• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Lightroom Classic
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Premiere
• Blender³
• Cinema 4D
• Sketch
• Visual Studio Code

If the Mac were to lose everything on that list, then they lose the following groups:

• 3D Artists
• Designers
• Music Producers
• Motion Graphics Artists
• Photographers
• Video Editors

For creative professionals, essentially the only remaining users would be the tiny subset of developers, music producers, and video editors that work exclusively in Xcode, Logic Pro, and Final Cut Pro respectively. A Mac cut down to just those users is a dead platform.

Van Bedient writing for the Adobe Blog:

The new Productions feature set for Premiere Pro was designed from the ground up with input from top filmmakers and Hollywood editorial teams. Early versions of the underlying technology were battle-tested on recent films such as “Terminator: Dark Fate” and “Dolemite is My Name.” Special builds of Premiere Pro with Productions are being used now in editorial on films like David Fincher’s “MANK.”

Notice that the approach Adobe is taking is exactly what Adam Lisagor complained about Apple not taking for Final Cut Pro X in 2011:

When Apple pushed FCP to the industry pros five or six years ago, they did some hardcore outreach. They brought out Walter Murch, for God’s sake. The man cut Cold Mountain on it for God’s sake.

Versus Adobe Team Projects

Adobe already has an existing feature for video collaboration called Adobe Team Projects, that’s designed around a cloud workflow, Bedient describes the difference:

Productions is designed for collaborators working on shared local storage. Team Projects is built for remote collaboration: assets can be stored locally with individual users; project files are securely stored in Creative Cloud. The two toolsets are distinct and currently cannot be combined. Productions is part of Premiere Pro and is included with all licenses. Team Projects is part of Team and Enterprise licenses for Premiere Pro and After Effects. In order to support users working from home due to COVID-19, Adobe is making Team Projects available to all users from April 14 through August 17, 2020. See this post for more information.

Collaboration & the Future of Creative Apps

Collaboration is the word of the day, and it’s great to see Adobe taking it seriously, especially with a vision that isn’t web-based. The web is the platform that makes collaboration the most straight-forward, the easiest way to share something is through a URL, but a web app isn’t necessarily the best trade-off for all use cases.

The question at the heart of Figma’s success is whether it winning the user-interface design market means web apps are also destined to win other creative markets which have otherwise been the stalwarts of desktop native apps. But another way of looking at it is that the native app they are competing with, Sketch, was doubly harmed by Apple’s policies:

1. It’s built on AppKit, which Apple was aggressively enhancing in the 2000s for high-end desktop apps but since the 2010s they’ve switched to focusing on frameworks that benefit iOS. This essentially means the platform Sketch is built on has spent a decade stagnating.
2. As software for professional creative users, Sketch isn’t compatible with the Mac App Store, this means they’ve been denied access to the most important promotion channel for Apple platforms.

Figma may have only been able to succeed because Sketch was built on a platform that’s at best indifferent to their use case, and at worst actively hostile to it. That’s a big difference compared to the cross-platform native desktop apps that are still relevant: Microsoft will fight tooth and nail to make sure Microsoft Office stays relevant, and Adobe will do the same with Adobe Creative Cloud.

I keep thinking about this post about git being irreplaceable with respect to Visual Studio Code. I don’t see how another text editor will ever be able to compete with VSCode, here’s how we got here:

• Pre-2004: BBEdit, Emacs, and Vim are all great text editors in their own right, but all have idiosyncrasies that, while beloved by people like me, prevent them from ever being the most popular text editor.
• 2004: TextMate is released, with its focus on packages to extend the editor and add support for different programming languages, but its API is still too limited to truly be a platform.
• 2008: Sublime Text is released, with a more sophisticated API, facilitating more powerful packages, but package management is still an afterthought.
• 2014: Atom is released, bringing package management to the forefront, but Atom has performance problems.
• 2015: Visual Studio Code is released, keeping packages front and center while also solving Atom’s performance issues. As far as I can tell, this essentially represents the final form for (mainstream) text editors.

I don’t see how VSCode can ever being contested again, unless its team makes a grave strategic error. We’ve seen over and over again, that once a platform takes off, its momentum creates a moat that’s almost impossible for challengers to overcome.

This post was adapted from a Twitter thread I posted.

An interesting new API in Visual Studio Code that allows replacing the entire text editing engine. They included a list of use cases:

• Previewing assets, such as shaders or 3D models, directly in VS Code.
• Creating WYSIWYG editors for languages such as Markdown or XAML.
• Offering alternative visual renderings for data files such as CSV or JSON or XML.
• Building fully customizable editing experiences text files.

It will be fascinating to see how far the text-editor-as-platform gets pushed.

Zapier releases a new tool for annotating screenshots called Zappy, in the tradition of Skitch, and, my favorite, the unfortunately discontinued Napkin.

I’m fascinated by this problem, it seems so simple on the surface: Just share what I’m looking at on the screen and be able to mark it up. But this problem is wonderfully devious in ways that emphasize our expectations when using computers. For example, once something is digital, we expect it be perfect. A poorly-drawn digital line is somehow worse than the same line drawn on a whiteboard.

Consider editing text, one of the first things a new computer user learns, and almost immediately they can produce pixel-perfect text every time. The comparative skill for just editing a line, is a Bezier curve tool like the one found in Adobe Illustrator, which is extraordinarily difficult to master by comparison.

Sharing an annotated screenshot brings out two truths about computers:

1. We expect digital artifacts to be perfect.
2. Editing anything graphical with a computer is very hard to master.

Alexander Käßner presents his iPad Main Menu concept. The menu concept itself is great, but what I’m really blown away by is the presentation, which is agency quality but was presumably created by one person. Käßner explained on Twitter that he created the demo video with Drama, Rotato, and Motion.

Theia is a new IDE “designed from the ground [sic] to run on Desktop and Cloud” released by The Eclipse Foundation:

Eclipse Theia is an extensible platform to develop multi-language Cloud & Desktop IDEs with state-of-the-art web technologies.

The screenshots look just like Visual Studio Code, and it supports VS Code extensions:

We believe VS Code is an excellent product. That is why Theia embraces many of the design decisions and even directly supports VS Code extensions.

As to distinctions from VS Code, as previously mentioned it’s designed as both a desktop and cloud IDE, there’s some details about what exactly that means in the Architecture Overview:

The frontend process represents the client and renders the UI. In the browser, it simply runs in the rendering loop, while in Electron it runs in an Electron Window, which basically is a browser with additional Electron and Node.js APIs. Therefore, any frontend code may assume browser as a platform but not Node.js.

I’m curious what benefits this entails in practice over using VS Code with the open-source code-server.

Another major component is the Open VSX Registry, which is described in a The DEV Community post as “an open-source implementation of a VS Code extension registry that we have developed under the umbrella of the Eclipse Foundation” with the rational being:

Unfortunately, Microsoft prohibits non-Visual Studio products from installing any binaries downloaded from their marketplace (see terms).

Gus Mueller of Flying Meat Software on how the image editor Acorn emerged organically from working on his annotation tool, FlySketch:

Acorn grew out of upgrades to another app of mine, FlySketch, designed for screen capture and sketching. Customers asked for new features, I started adding brushes and layers and multiple windows, and all of a sudden I had a full-blown image editor. But Acorn still serves different needs than professional-level editors. Acorn is powerful, but nimble and approachable. It also has excellent documentation that we’ve worked hard on for years.

On the day after The Omni Group had layoffs, web collaboration startup Notion announced they’ve raised a series A round of $50 Million, as Erin Griffith reports for The New York Times. Per the article, Notion is also already profitable¹.

An interesting characteristic of the new wave of web apps is that they run client side. Figma, for example, runs C++ code compiled to WebAssembly client side, and email startup Superhuman also runs client side as Sarah Perez writes for TechCrunch¹:

Unlike most browser-based email, which is server-based, Superhuman can store and index gigabytes of email in the web browser itself. This is possible by leveraging today’s more powerful APIs in the browser, along with the faster CPUs and hard drives on our computers.

The Omni Group’s 2020 roadmap has a great section on automation that’s worth reading in its entirety. It covers both their future plans for their own apps, and a declaration of why automation is important in general:

By providing automation technology in our apps, we make it possible for customers to extend our apps’ capabilities. People can build customized solutions to meet their own needs—and then share those solutions with others. We had thousands of customers using Kinkless GTD in OmniOutliner, even though most of those customers didn’t know AppleScript. I’ve been told that one of JTech Communications’ most popular blog posts was for a script for OmniGraffle which counts items on a canvas. With automation, people are able to create their own keyboard shortcuts to quickly perform actions like creating a task calendar from OmniFocus, or exporting Markdown from OmniOutliner—and those solutions can often be shared with others, making everyone’s lives easier.

The Omni Group is apparently going through some hard times, bless them for taking automation so seriously in their apps.

There are a couple of interesting products to look at for the future of creative apps: The first is Figma, the first-ever web app to gain traction with creative professionals, another is Lightroom CC, Adobe’s newer alternative to Lightroom Classic. Lightroom Classic is the same application Adobe has been shipping since 2007, it has more powerful features¹, in particular fine-grained control over how your image files are managed on disk. Lightroom CC is a newer alternative, and it’s the only version available on mobile. Lightroom CC has no control at all over your image files (“the era of the file is over”—Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe). Instead, all of your image files are synced to Adobe Creative Cloud. While it’s still behind Sketch, Figma has clearly been a resounding success with professionals. It’s harder to gauge how successful Lightroom CC has been, on one hand, it’s not marketed to professionals to begin with, but on the other, it’s hard to interpret Adobe’s choice of the word “Classic” in the name as anything other than an attempt to drive users to the newer app.

So how’s that going? Jenn Mishra recently wrote an article about sticking with Lightroom Classic for PetaPixel. Looking at the comments, this article received a hundred of them before the comment limit kicked in, and there’s only one comment that’s positive about Lightroom CC: It’s easy to find, it’s at the bottom, with the most downvotes.

Steve Hullfish interviews Parasite editor Jinmo Yang for ProVideo Coalition:

The reason why I use it is that I’m used to it. I used Final Cut Pro from the very beginning of my career. For now — regarding sound mix and the workflow — it’s really simple to use. However, I haven’t been able to update my OS for four years.

Final Cut Pro 7 was released in 2009.

BushelScript is an open-source AppleScript alternative:

BushelScript is open-source and community-driven, meaning it can undergo necessary changes and gain useful features rather than remain stagnant as a side project on life support.

The real tragedy of AppleScript is not its becoming obsolete or irrelevant; tons of Apple-supported macOS apps still have healthy scripting interfaces. No, the tragedy is that the language through which such functionality is presented, with all its quirks and weak points and even utter failures, is extremely unlikely to receive any badly needed improvements in the future, if any changes at all. It is stuck in maintenance (read: bugfix and security hole-filling) mode and will be for years to come if we, the users, don’t replace it with something better whose fate we can control.

On the WebKit blog, Apple announces they’re putting a “7-Day Cap on All Script-Writeable Storage” for privacy reasons:

Back in February 2019, we announced that ITP would cap the expiry of client-side cookies to seven days. That change curbed third-party scripts’ use of first-party cookies for the purposes of cross-site tracking.

However, as many anticipated, third-party scripts moved to other means of first-party storage such as LocalStorage. If you have a look at what’s stored in the first-party space on many websites today, it’s littered with data keyed as various forms of “tracker brand user ID.” To make matters worse, APIs like LocalStorage have no expiry function at all, i.e. websites cannot even ask browsers to put a limit on how long such storage should stay around.

In iPadOS 13.4 and Safari 13.1, all forms of offline storage for web apps will be purged after seven days. When I wrote about how iPadOS’s new mouse support will benefit web apps, there’s an additional observation that I neglected to mention: There are only two ways apps can target that iPad, either as a native app available through the App Store, or as a web app accessed through a browser. Since App Store rule 2.5.6 prevents browsers from using third-party rendering engines on iOS, this effectively means Apple has complete control over all methods of software distribution on iOS. And, since native apps are more of a differentiating feature for iPadOS than web apps, as the coming iPadOS mouse support starts to make desktop-class web apps usable on the iPad for the first time, we can expect Apple to correspondingly start hindering web apps in order to give native apps an advantage on their platforms.

An Apple video¹ with developers talking about what they can do with the new iPad Pro’s LiDAR scanner.