BBEdit is celebrating a round anniversary these days: The classic text editor for macOS has been commercially available for exactly 30 years. “When Bare Bones Software sold the first commercial license for BBEdit, that was Nokia 2210 the hot new cell phone, John Sculley III. was the CEO of Apple Computer, Inc. and “Unforgiven” was voted best film of the year,” the producer wrote in a short press release on Tuesday.
Actually even older
But actually BBEdit is even a bit older. Maker Rich Siegel, who still owns Bare Bones Software, first offered a non-commercial version of the software for the classic macOS on April 12, 1992. And “offered” at that time meant above all distribution on diskette or via mailbox systems, AOL or Compuserve – because almost nobody surfed the web at that time, the first popular browser NCSA Mosaic only appeared in 1993.
Siegel soon turned the project into a commercial company and offered BBEdit as shareware. The app quickly became indispensable on most Macs. In the dot-com era, developers used the tool to create numerous websites and wrote texts with it. In the meantime, Bare Bones Software also went into business with the e-mail clients (Mailsmith) and later also brought the information manager Jojimbo out of here. A stripped down (free) version of BBEdit was sold as TextWrangler as a gateway drug rather than a lite version of BBEdit. In the meantime, BBEdit has taken over this job itself, whose entry-level features are still free. And year after year BBEdit has evolved, becoming one of the pro editors of choice for every new programming language, no matter what’s going on in the dev world.
Birthday anniversary award
For BBEdit’s birthday, Bare Bones Software came up with a deal. Between May 11th and 13th, single-user licenses of BBEdit will be sold for $30, which is $20 off the regular price. To participate, enter the voucher code “BBEDIT30” at the checkout of the purchase process. Fans can also Bare Bones Software official merch store a limited edition t-shirt and a special limited edition pin E-Mail acquire.
Meanwhile, the development of BBEdit continues unabated. Most recently, version 14.6.5 was presented, the fixes various bugs. Among other things, version 14.6 added a new low-level text rendering function that updates BBEdit’s internal text rendering engine.
(bsc)
