Roben Kleene

The Era of Visual Studio Code

VS Code Hero

The most important thing I look for when choosing which tools to use is longevity. Learning software is an investment, and if you have to switch to another application later, you lose some of that investment.

In most software categories, choosing the software with longevity is easy, the most popular tools are usually the ones that have been around the longest. Microsoft Excel and Adobe Illustrator were both released in 1987 and, for the most part, they’ve remained the most popular software in their categories since then.

Text editors, on the other hand, are a software category where the most popular options are not the oldest. According to the Stack Overflow Annual Developer Survey, Sublime Text was the most popular text editor available on the Mac from 2015–2017. Sublime Text was released in 2008, a sprightly youth compared to Excel and Illustrator. Text editors have been a category with a lot of movement: In the last 20 years, TextMate, Sublime Text, and Atom have all been the text editor with the most momentum1. For big complicated desktop software, has any other category ever had so much movement?

I believe the era of new text editors emerging and quickly becoming popular has now ended with Visual Studio Code. VS Code has reached unprecedented levels of popularity and refinement, laying a foundation that could mean decades of market dominance. If, like me, one of your priorities for your tools is longevity2, then that means VS Code might be a great text editor to invest in learning today.

The case for VS Code’s longevity comes from several points we’ll cover in this piece:

  1. Popularity: It’s crossed a popularity threshold that no earlier text editor in recent history has crossed.
  2. The Text Editor as Platform: It’s the endgame of a revolution that saw text editors be remade around extensions.
  3. Paradigm Transcendence: It’s transcended its paradigm as a desktop app by becoming a hosted web app, and even a reference implementation.
  4. Company Management: It’s managed by a powerful tech company, and it’s being developed aggressively.

Popularity

VS Code is the most popular text editor today. It’s so popular, that it could be the most popular GUI programming tool of all time. Since 2015, Stack Overflow has included questions about text editors in their survey3. Back then Notepad++ was the most popular text editor, with 34.7% of respondents saying they were “likely to use it”. In the following years, the popularities of different text editors moved around a bit, but nothing ever broke the 40% mark. That is, until its most recent poll in 2019, when VS Code jumped to 50.7%. This was the second year in a row that VS Code increased by ~45%, this time jumping from 34.9% in 2018, where it had already been the most popular.

Text Editor Popularity 2015–2019

Text Editor Popularity

(Note that Stackoverflow started allowing multiple answers between 2015 and 2016, so I’d take the changes between those two years in particular with a grain of salt.)

The Text Editor as Platform

So VS Code is objectively wildly popular; the next point we’re going to look at is more qualitative. For the past couple of decades, text editors have been on a trajectory that I believe VS Code is the final representation of. This is the progression of text editors becoming platforms in their own right by increasing the role and capabilities of extensions. What follows is the history of this progression4.

Pre-2004: BBEdit, Emacs, and Vim

BBEdit, Emacs, and Vim are all great text editors in their own right, but they all have idiosyncrasies that (while beloved by people like me) prevent them from ever being the most popular text editor.

Emacs, and Vim’s predecessor Vi, were both first released in 1976, before many of todays user-interface conventions were solidified. Predating conventions like using a modifier key with Z, X, C, and V for undo, cut, copy, and paste. These keyboard shortcuts were popularized by the original Macintosh, released 1985, and Windows, which in 1992 with the release of Windows 3.1. Neither Emacs5 or Vim use these keys, and instead use their own terminology. They both use the term “yank” for example (although to mean different things, it’s copy in Vim, and paste in Emacs).

BBEdit was released in 1992, around the time that some of the first GUI tools emerged that would become dynasties. Note the proximity to Excel (1987), Illustrator (1987), and Photoshop (1990). And just like those apps, BBEdit is still relevant today. But unlike those apps, it’s not the most popular in its category, by a wide margin. The reason seems to be at least partially that it never fully adapted to a world where text editors put so much emphasis on package-driven ecosystems.

2004: TextMate

TextMate, released in 2004, is arguably the most influential text editor ever. Among the numerous features it popularized are abbreviation-based snippets, automatic paired characters, and fuzzy finding by file name. All of these features became staples in every popular text editor that followed. The implementations of Scope Selectors and theming that TextMate pioneered have also formed the basis for themes and syntax highlighting in every subsequent popular text editor.

That’s already a lot to originate from a single app, but it still doesn’t even include TextMate’s most significant innovation; the one that would go on to re-shape text editors, solidify niche status for every text editor that came before it, and pave the way for VS Code to become the most popular text editor in history a decade later. TextMate’s most important innovation was that it was the first popular text editor that was primarily built around extensions.

While TextMate popularized the concept of a text editor built around extensions, in hindsight, it didn’t go far enough. TextMate’s extensions had limitations that later text editors would thrive by removing.

2008: Sublime Text

Sublime Text, released in 2008, popularized the minimap and multiple cursors. And unlike TextMate and BBEdit, it’s cross-platform, running on Linux, MacOS, and Windows, which helped it reach a wider audience than those editors. But Sublime Text’s biggest impact was greatly expanding the capabilities of extensions.

Sublime Text’s extensions run in an embedded Python runtime with an extensive API, unlike TextMate which uses the scripting languages built-in to macOS, and rather than having a proper extension API, mainly centers on processing standard out.

Sublime Text greatly expanded what extensions could do, allowing more sophisticated integrations such as linters that included GUI components. And Package Control, the enormously popular package manager for Sublime Text built by Will Bond6, features a centralized source for package management, reducing the friction to browse, install, and update packages; a model that all subsequent popular text editors would also adopt.

Even with Sublime Text’s expanded extensions, it still didn’t go far enough. Package Control wasn’t built-in, and, while Sublime Text does have an API, its use of Python with custom calls for GUI components still left room for future text editors to make extensions more accessible to build.

2014: Atom

Atom, released by GitHub in 2014, finally brings extensions to their final form. Atom’s package manager is built in7, displays extension READMEs complete with inline images (and early extensions made by GitHub themselves popularized the convention of using animated GIFs to illustrate functionality), creating an extension experience reminiscent of an app store.

Then there’s the matter of HTML and CSS8. Atom is built on Electron9, which means the editor itself is written in JavaScript and runs on Node10. Compared to Sublime Text’s Python API; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are some of most widely-known languages in existence, which greatly lowers the barrier of entry for creating extensions.

Atom had essentially perfected the extension-based editor, there was just one problem: It’s slow. Performance complaints have plagued Atom since its release, and market ended up split with Sublime Text, which is lightning fast by comparison.

2015: Visual Studio Code

VS Code was released in 2015, based on the Monaco Editor that Microsoft had first released in 2013 that could be embedded into websites. When GitHub released Electron along with Atom. Microsoft used it to create a desktop version of the Monaco Editor called Visual Studio Code.

VS Code takes the same formula as Atom11—a local web-based text editor written in Electron with an emphasis on extensions—and makes it more performant. VS Code makes extensions even more visible, by putting them in the sidebar, raising to the same level as file browsing, searching, source control, and debugging. VS Code extensions can have rich user-interfaces, being written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and with full-access to Node, they can essentially do anything any other application can do. And indeed, some extensions start to look like apps in and of themselves.

With VS Code, the extension-based text editor has seemingly reached its final form. Ever since TextMate, extensions have increased in prominence and capabilities, and with VS Code, that progression appears to have culminated. There just isn’t anywhere else to go. Correspondingly, there isn’t a way a new text editor can leapfrog VS Code the same way previous text editors have been leapfrogging each other by improving extensions.

Paradigm Transcendence

So far we’ve looked at VS Code’s popularity, and its extensions implementation, as indicators of longevity. The third indicator we’ll look at is how VS Code has moved beyond the confines of the desktop. The code-server project runs VS Code as a regular web app, in other words, hosted on a server and accessed through the browser. GitHub’s Codespaces also run VS Code as a web app, this time by spinning up an ad hoc development environment.

Transcending a paradigm, like going from a desktop app to a web app, is a great indicator of longevity. For one, it means it’s more likely to be ported to more paradigms in the future. It takes herculean effort to port to a new paradigm, and expending that effort is a great indicator of value. Emacs and Vim were both ported from the terminal to GUI applications; they were too valuable not to have GUI versions. Photoshop and Excel both run on mobile12, and Illustrator is coming soon. Excel also has a web version13, and there’s a streaming version of Photoshop (although it’s been in closed beta for six years).

Not only has VS Code transcended the parameters of its initial implementation by becoming a web app, it’s also became something of a standard. Version 1.0 of the Theia IDE maintained by the Eclipse Foundation is a re-implementation of VS Code. VS Code is now not only a text editor, but also a model of how a text editor should behave.

Company Management

TextMate is largely the work of one developer, Allan Odgaard, the same with Sublime Text and Jon Skinner. Both of these applications eventually ran into trouble with frustrated users for perceived slow release schedules.

Here’s the history of major releases for these two applications:

  • 2004: TextMate 1
  • 2008: Sublime Text 1
  • 2011: Sublime Text 2 Alpha
  • 2012: Sublime Text 2
  • 2012: TextMate 2 Alpha
  • 2013: Sublime Text 3 Beta
  • 2017: Sublime Text 3
  • 2019: TextMate 2

Here’s a graph of the number of years between stable major releases (contrasted with the release dates for BBEdit 10–13 for comparison):

Text Editor Release Schedule

A couple things jump out from this graph immediately:

  1. TextMate 2 took a long time.
  2. Sublime Text has been consistent with their release schedule.

The complaints about Sublime Text seem to center around the gap between the Sublime Text 3 Beta being announced in 2013 and released in 2017, and a perceived lack of sufficient changes during that period. Sublime Text’s release schedule is slow when compared to BBEdit’s which has released three major versions (11, 12, and 13), while Sublime Text 3 has been in beta. Although Coda 2 from Panic was released in 2012, and wasn’t updated until just recently when its spiritual successor, Nova, was released. That’s a gap of around eight years, so it’s unclear whether Sublime Text’s release schedule is really an anomaly for a commercial text editor.

The current version of VS Code is 1.49, but VS Code is open source, so it plays by different rules than commercial apps. Major versions exist at least partially as an opportunity for companies to charge for upgrades.

Since VS Code is developed out in the open, we can evaluate its pace of development directly by reviewing its commit history. VS Code’s commit graph on GitHub tells a story of aggressive development, out pacing Atom, and even other large open source project like Facebook’s React (note that these graphs have different scales on the Y-axis).

Visual Studio Code Commit Graph

Visual Studio Code Commit Graph

Atom Commit Graph

Atom Commit Graph

React Commit Graph

React Commit Graph

Aggressive development pulls platforms away from the pack because the combination of forward momentum, and third parties building on the platform, is difficult to compete with14. This is the same combination that makes it so hard for new entrants to compete with popular browsers or OSes.

Conclusion

The goal of this piece is to determine if VS Code is a good investment in learning if you value longevity. An implication of the Text Editor as Platform, is that since TextMate’s introduction in 2004, every few years the text editor with the most momentum has changed. These would be short reigns by any standard, but they’re positively miniscule compared to apps like Excel and Photoshop. Learning a new text editor is a questionable investment if you expect something new to come along every few years.

VS Code is giving indications that the era of short reigns for text editors is over. It has the potential to maintain its position as the most popular text editor for a much longer time, possibly for decades, if we use examples of popular software in other categories as a guides. As we’ve outlined in this piece, the case for this is following:

  1. It’s crossed a popularity threshold that’s eluded other text editors by being used by over 50% of developers.
  2. It’s the final form of progression towards maximizing the power and visibility of extensions, making it immune to being leapfrogged by a new text editor with a more capable extension model.
  3. It’s moved beyond its origins as a desktop app, it’s also a web app, and it’s even become a model of how a text editor should behave.
  4. It’s managed by a company, so it’s unlikely to run into the development stagnation that’s plagued other text editors.

Before VS Code, I expected to never learn another general-purpose text editor that wasn’t Emacs or Vim again, it was just too risky. I’ve found a good way to make predictions is to assume things will stay the same; with text editors, that means expecting a new text editor will emerge every few years that gains most of the momentum. Expecting anything else to happen requires extraordinary evidence.

I believe VS Code has presented extraordinary evidence. I’m hoping it moves into the category with apps like Excel, Illustrator, Photoshop, software that has held the most popular position in its category for decades. These applications are reliably time investments that repay their cost of learning over the course of a career. Emacs and Vim have always been like that, but it’s always good to have more choice.

  1. If you think about it, the fact that the most popular text editor is newer than popular software in other categories is pretty strange, since text editing predates almost every other computer task. I think there are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that, on a technical level, writing a text editor is easier than other categories. While I don’t want to downplay the difficulty, text files are the lingua franca of computers, and nearly every major software development framework has at least some built-in support for them. Modern hardware also gives you a lot of performance headroom to develop a text editor that you don’t have if you’re developing, say, a video editor.

    The second reason is that it’s easier for users to switch text editors. While learning new complex software packages is always difficult, at least with text editors you can just open your existing projects with a new one and start editing them, since development projects are just made up of plain text files. There’s almost no other software category where this is true, most applications use proprietary formats that only their application can read. Another reason text editors tend to be easier to pick up is that it’s usually, but not always, easy to figure out the basics: How to enter and edit text. The basics are usually easier to figure out than, say, Adobe Illustrator, which is almost impossible to use without reading the manual.

    These factors combine to make text editors a particularly competitive market, and competition is effective in driving innovation. For my money, it’s made text editors the best software there is: They have the best balance of form and function of any software category. The closest competition are browsers and terminals, which also combine power and flexibility into an elegant package, but I give the edge to text editors, because browsers and terminals achieve their power by simply wrapping powerful concepts, a protocol and standard streams respectively. With text editors in contrast, the user interface is the application in a way that just isn’t true for those other types of applications. (This is also why browsers and terminals all feel roughly the same, while text editors are wonderfully diverse.) ↩︎

  2. If longevity is my priority, then why not use Emacs or Vim? For Vim, the answer is easy, I do already use it. But I don’t like writing prose in Vim’s modal editing model, so I started seeking out a non-modal editor to complement Vim.

    I’ve also spent a fair amount of time with Emacs, but it started crashing for me with an issue similar to this one. The author of that post solved their problem by compiling Emacs locally to run it in lldb, which is farther than I was willing to go to solve my problem.

    Emacs has a difficult balancing act to walk: It’s incredibly customizable, but it’s also fragmented. For the Mac, there are several popular ports. And, macOS isn’t a high-priority platform for Emacs. There’s a history of blocking macOS-only features from Emacs, as well as removing features that are already working. All-in-all this makes Emacs a hard sell on macOS. Customizability and fragmentation aren’t a great combination to begin with, because customizations will often work in one version and not another. But when combined with relatively low market-share (4.5% in 2019), and being on a platform that’s a second-class citizen relative to GNU/Linux, it’s hard to recommend, despite its strong points. ↩︎

  3. For some reason Stack Overflow removed the questions about developer tools like text editors for the 2020 survey unfortunately. ↩︎

  4. The progression of text editors becoming a platform is adapted from a previous post, which is in turn adapted from a Twitter thread. ↩︎

  5. Emacs does include cua-mode, which when turned on, defines C-x, C-c, C-v, and C-z as “cut (kill), copy, paste (yank), and undo respectively”. (The name cua-mode, is a bit of a misnomer because IBM Common User Access never used these key bindings.) ↩︎

  6. Will Bond was hired by Sublime HQ in 2016. ↩︎

  7. TextMate 2, released in December 2011, also had the first built-in extension browser in a popular text editor. ↩︎

  8. Light Table, released in 2012, is another important milestone in the web-based text editor journey. Light Table uses NW.js (formerly node-webkit), a predecessor to Electron, and it had an integrated package manager—foreshadowing the same combination that Atom would use a couple of years later.

    What’s most interesting about Light Table that it focused on innovative new features first, like watching variables change as code executes, evaluating code inline, and embedding running projects in the editor itself (some of these features inspired by Bret Victor’s seminal “Inventing on Principle” talk). These are features that even now, eight years later, have been slow to make it into the text editors that followed.

    Light Table was about new features that weren’t available anywhere else, whereas Atom, its closet successor that used a similar web-based approach, was about incremental improvements over previous text editors. Atom’s main feature was that it was web-based, whereas Light Table was about new features that had never been done before. ↩︎

  9. Electron was originally called “Atom Shell”. ↩︎

  10. Atom was originally written in CoffeeScript. ↩︎

  11. VS Code is less “hackable” than other text editors. For example, it doesn’t have an “init” file in the tradition of .emacs.d and .vimrc (Atom does have one). This makes VS Code harder to customize, since the only way to do it is to create an extension. ↩︎

  12. Presumably, VS Code would already exist on iOS were it technically feasible to do so, since it’s open source and so popular. It makes an interesting case study for the future of iPadOS as a platform. Because, if it’s not technically possible to port VS Code to iPadOS, then, as VS Code becomes ubiquitous, that increasingly becomes synonymous with iPadOS not supporting programming at all.

    The point is probably moot, because an iOS native version of VS Code would probably work with the same client-server model described in Paradigm Transcendence. But it’s still an interesting thought experiment, because I often see the prediction that iPadOS will [disrupt] the industry from the bottom(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation). I wonder how can that happen if a platform puts up so many technical barriers for creating a text editor? ↩︎

  13. Another nice thing about having a web version is that web apps don’t have to abide by the App Store Review Guidelines, so applications prohibited by Apple can still exist on the platform. ↩︎

  14. As I’m fond of saying, if you’re looking for areas that will be disrupted by new technology, look for areas of neglect. ↩︎

Remembering the O'Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Contest

From 2003 to 2004, O’Reilly Media ran the O’Reilly Mac OS X Innovators Contest, sponsored by Apple via the Apple Developer Connection (now just Apple Developer). I still think of these winners as some of the high watermarks of app innovation. Many concepts we take for granted today were either introduced, or popularized, by apps on this list. Here are a few of my favorite examples:

  • NetNewsWire, while not necessarily the first RSS feed reader, was one of the most popular early ones. RSS feed readers are the origin of consuming media through streams of content, now exemplified by Twitter and Facebook’s Newsfeed.
  • SubEthaEdit was one of the earliest practical implementations of multiple simultaneous live document editing, a concept later brought to a much wider audience by Google Docs in 2006.
  • LaunchBar popularized many features we take for granted in search user interfaces today, such as seeing search results live as you type, fuzzy string matching, and combining search results of various types, such as apps, bookmarks, contacts, events, and files all into one unified interface.

I’ve listed the winners below, and linked to all the ones that are still maintained, so you can see visually just how many these apps are still around. All of these apps are over fifteen years old now.

2003 Round One Winners

2003 Second Round Winners

2003 O’Reilly Mac OS X Conference Winners

  • First Place, US Category: OmniOutliner
  • Second Place, US Category: iBlog
  • First Place, International Category: iStopMotion
  • Second Place, International Category: ACSLogo
  • Honorable Mention: F-Script

2004 Winners

  • First Place, U.S.: Delicious Library
  • First Place, International: FotoMagico
  • Second Place, U.S.: Curio
  • Second Place, International: iDive
  • Honorable Mention, U.S.: Nicecast
  • Honorable Mention, International: Process

macOS Big Sur: Has the Dust Finally Settled on Limiting Third-Party Apps?

Apple’s strategy for years has been to trade desktop power for cross-device feature parity. As expected, macOS Big Sur continues this trend, emphasizing a consistent user interface across devices, and focusing on cross-device development technologies like SwiftUI and Catalyst.

Personally, I wish Apple had different priorities. I’d like to see more apps like Sketch, an industry-leading creative app that’s built top to bottom on Apple technologies. But Sketch was released in 2010, and Apple hasn’t created any new frameworks like Core Graphics and Core Image that support these kinds of apps in over a decade. So I wasn’t holding my breath for them to announce anything new for these kinds of apps at WWDC this year.

Since Apple isn’t prioritizing powerful desktop apps with their own technologies, that means supporting these use cases mostly falls on third parties. This is where companies like Adobe, Avid, Maxon, and Microsoft come in. While Apple’s priorities regarding their own technologies have been clear for awhile now, what hasn’t been clear is their priorities for third-party apps, in particular, ones that aren’t sandboxed. The trend for the last few years has been making it harder to develop these kinds of apps for macOS. AEpocalypse (2018), Catalina’s security features (2019), and Notarization (2018) are all examples of this trend.

The overarching reason behind the changes that make developing these kinds of apps harder is “Security”. And unlike cross-device feature parity, it’s unclear exactly where this all ends. Because after all, the most secure system there is is the one that doesn’t run any software at all. That’s why it’s such a pleasant surprise, that, as far as I can tell, Apple has done everything they can to make Big Sur, and the accompanying transition to Apple Silicon, as seamless as possible, even for apps that aren’t sandboxed.

Some were predicting that Macs on Apple Silicon wouldn’t even run apps from outside of the Mac App Store, that didn’t happen. It seemed more likely that Apple would drop OpenCL and OpenGL, but those are sticking along for the ride. No details were known about whether there would be an emulation layer like the original Rosetta from the 2006 Intel transition. Apple appears to have gone above in beyond with Rosetta 2, which even supports plug-ins like VSTis, giving lots of options for migration paths for powerful modular software.

I’m still frustrated that there probably won’t be another Sketch for the foreseeable future, but that ship sailed a long time ago. And no other platform has a Sketch either, an industry defining app that’s a platform exclusive, so while Apple has lost a unique advantage that only they had, they haven’t lost anything that other platforms already have. Other platforms can run powerful modular software that’s distributed outside the Mac App Store, but today, so can new Macs running Big Sur. Here’s to hoping that the dust has settled, and the last of the restrictions on third-party apps are behind us now.

The Enduring Influence of TextMate

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”.

On the Mere Suggestion That ARM Macs Might Only Run Sandboxed Apps

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:

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.

  1. Mysterious (former?) AppKit engineer (and fish shell maintainer) ridiculous fish also shares this worry. ↩︎

  2. This is a short list. There are many more applications I suspect should be on this list, but these are all applications that I’m familiar enough with both the application itself, and more importantly, the community around it, to know that people would rather move to another platform, then lose the application. ↩︎

  3. We are in danger of losing one application from this list either way: Blender. As Mueller states:

    Assertion: OpenGL is going away on ARM for MacOS.

    Yea, this is totally happening. OpenGL and OpenCL have been deprecated for a while now in favor of Metal. Apple will use this opportunity to drop them.

    My understanding is that this means Blender would have to support Metal in order to run on new ARM Macs. I think there’s enough intertia in the Blender community to support Metal, if the alternative is to lose the Mac as a platform, but I’ll be worried about this until that actually happens. ↩︎

Software to Die For

Before I switched to being a full-time developer in 2010, I worked as a user-interface designer for seven years. Something that always bothered me during that time is that so much of what I was learning was just how to use Photoshop really well. After I switched to development, I was hesitant to ever invest that much in just learning a big software package again. “What if I choose wrong? And waste all those years of learning by switching to another software package?” I asked myself. Recently, I’ve re-evaluated that decision, based on my analysis of the market share of major creative applications. It turns out if I’d just chosen which software I want to learn ten years ago, for most categories, it would still be the same today. For some categories, it would still be the same if I’d chosen twenty years ago, and it’s often the first software that was ever introduced to solve a problem, even if that application is over 30 years ago, that’s still the best choice today. So it turns out I was overcorrecting relative to the risk in learning big complex packages, so now I’m investing in doing it again.

This is the list of software I’ve chosen to learn:

Some of these I already know quite well (Vim, Photoshop), and some I’ve barely touched (Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro). I’m not happy with the duplication, and frankly, this is probably just too much for one person. Learning any one of these applications is an lifetime of work, let alone all of them. But I can’t decide what to cut, so here we are.

Productions for Adobe Premiere Pro

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.

Is Visual Studio Code Irreplaceable?

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.

Visual Studio Code's New 'Custom Editor API'

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.

Zappy

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.

Theia: Cloud & Desktop IDE Platform

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).

The Origins of Acorn

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.

A Tail of Two Companies

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.

  1. Notably, Whimsical, another web startup that competes directly one of The Omni Group’s products, OmniGraffle, announced they’ve reached profitability as of May last year. Coincidentally, Whimsical also integrates nicely with Notion. ↩︎

The New Wave Is Client-Side Web Apps

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.

  1. Islam Sharabash has a post on Superhuman’s blog that goes into more technical details about how Superhuman works. ↩︎

The Omni Group Roadmap 2020: Automation

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.

How's Lightroom CC Doing?

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.

  1. Incredibly, Lightroom CC does not include Lightroom Classic’s insanely useful History Panel, which seems like it should be one of the defining features of a non-destructive image editor. ↩︎

BushelScript, Next-Generation Open-Source AppleScript

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.

Apple Limits Offline Storage for Web App

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.