If you are one of the many who kept using TextMate over the past few dim and hazy years, even if you don’t find the alpha usable yet its mere existence is fantastic news. It’s a pretty good sign that—despite all the cynicism from jerks like me—the thing’s actually going to be released. It’s missing features and has some performance issues, but hey, it’s an alpha.

[It’s been interesting, no doubt. But even as I was tweaking Mark Hurst about his “works just fine” monitor, I admit that for the most part the original TextMate was working just fine for most things. BBEdit gets used for certain situations still, and in some ways always feels like home. Either way, the “it’s not new” syndrome is a problem from my perspective because I feel like that model is broken. I’m not alone, Patagonia (the clothing company) is getting a lot of press about their recent ad telling you to “not buy this jacket” and explaining why. So while it was fun to poke at Mark about his monitor, as he said, it’s working for him just fine. And while a new monitor might use less energy (as I teased), and Mark will no doubt give away the old one working or not, I can’t make the case that more energy overall would not be used in the creation of the new monitor. He’s doing the right thing. When it comes to software the model has shifted. Adding features used to be considered a good thing. Now it’s not that simple (no pun intended). And sometimes the best “new” feature is the one that causes the rethinking of all the old features. But that’s a topic for a different day.]
Source: Coyote Tracks