This talk is not supposed to be technical or marketing, but more of a ramble. We'll see. :-)
"Living above the Curve" BB is a strange company, as they've been Mac-only are have been in business for over 10 years. Haven't gone out of bussiness, gone public, or been bought. It's very rare. They make a living doing Mac-only. So it can be done.
What are the topics: Why are they still around? Embracing the hard. World domination.
Why are they still around? Customer loyalty. They spend the money to make it all possible. And those customers help to breed other customers. Word of mouth, new features, etc. Industry changes have helped, too. BBEdit was originally a programmer's editor. But BBEdit had a plug-in interface. And HTML came along. Customers began developing HTML plug-ins. People actually bought BBEdit for the purpose of using one of those 3rd party plug-ins.
Back in 1997, things were bad. Everyone thought Apple was gonna die. Other companies began developing Windows software. And that's often more expensive. And if your Windows software is really good, Microsoft eventually buys you, puts you out of business, or otherwise squashes you.
Mac platform changes have helped too. 68k to PowerPC helped a lot. Allowed BB to adopt very quickly. The move to OS X has helped too. If you move quickly (like BB did), you can ride the wave very well.
They're careful about picking their fights very carefully.
There is always room for 3rd party software. Apple can't do it all and needs 3rd party software. They always will.
What about the move to OS X and "carbonizing" their application? OS X is brutal because it doesn't tolerate mis-behaving applications. OS 9 let things gradually degrade. OS X is WAY more stable. Cabon forced them to review their code and find latent bugs that had been around for years and years. Had to work to meet Aqua standards. Had to realize that OS X is Unix and that means a whole lot of new things they could do.
Don't limit yourself to Carbon. Use Cocoa. Use Unix functionality.
BBEdit can be run from the command-line and take command-line args. You get things file filename globbing automatically. You can pipe to it. It even has a man page! Very cool. :-)
There's a feature that acts a lot like a shell buffer in Emacs. You even get undo. You can run arbitrary Unix filters on selected text.
Posted by jzawodn at October 02, 2002 05:02 PM
This is actually more a question...sorry. I have an old test computer that won't boot from the CDROM and I really need the boot disks for lindows if you know where to find them please let me know, I have been searching for days. thank you
Um...not sure why you are asking this question here...
How did you get Lindows? When I bought it, I had no boot disks. I downloaded an ISO image from the website, burned the CD, and boot/install from there. Do you still have this CD?
