Friday 20 April 2018

TextWrangler is end of life, and why I care

For those of you unfamiliar with the product, TextWrangler is a very nice language aware text editor for OS X from the same people who produce BBEdit.

Over the years I've used in mainly to write MarkDown, raw HTML and Perl, and it's done my proud. The folks at BBEdit have now decided to cease development of TextWrangler, and encourage people to move to BBEdit, although existing TextWrangler installations will continue to work provided you don't upgrade to the latest version of OS X (now Mac OS).

Essentially if you move to BBEdit, you get a thirty day free trial of the paid for product after which time you can say 'No thanks' and dropdown from the paid for product to a free version BBedit Lite, which has all the features currently in TextWrangler.

BBedit don'd publish product roadmaps, so we can't say with certainty what's the future of BBEdit Lite, but it's probably fair enough to assume that it'll be around for a few years.

Unfortunate, but that's life. It's their product, and they can do what they like with it.

Personally, I find that these days I'm increasingly going back to the Windows platform, so I'll probably not be that inconvenienced by its demise.

However, over the years, I've helped several citizen science, local history, and other community projects get going, be it counting bugs (real bugs ones with six legs) or transcribing old records.

These projects usually struggle to buy a box of teabags and a pack of MacVities digestives, and this is usually where I get involved.

These projects are often very reliant on volunteer labour and have next to no budget for anything. Basically what I do is try and get their recording methodology in place and help them get software installed.

Often they acquire what IT equipment they have through donations - old iMacs from dentist's surgeries, local library system cast offs, or PC's donated via a bank's community programme.

Now the people involved in these projects are often highly skilled in their specialisation, but they're not really into digital archiving or indeed IT generally.

So, when helping them get going I've tended to emphasise open products with open file formats so that the data can be imported into something else later with a minimum of effort. At the same time I've usually encouraged people to use text as a format for working notes and records because of it's clarity and simplicity.

And where possible, I've tried to leave them in a situation where they can be self supporting with simple products that it doesn't matter too much if they don't upgrade.

Now, remember these iMacs from the dentists surgery (and others from other places).

Over the last 10 or 12 years I've been recommending TextWrangler to my Mac users, because (a) it was rock solid, and (b) free. It's running on old machines, many of which will never, or can never, be upgraded to the latest version of OS X.

That shouldn't be a problem, except that TextWrangler now tells you it's end of life when it checks for updates, and this confuses people. They think they have to upgrade, even when they don't, and the  whole 'try before you buy' thing confuses them even more.

And that's creating a support problem. Like I said, unfortunate.

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