I would not consider this a "considered approach." He's doing a multi-year, ground-up rewrite of a highly successful product in order to add a list of features geared towards Textmate developers (of which there are roughly 1), rather than end-users.
Meanwhile, he gets so many complaints from dissatisfied users wanting a few core features added to the 1.x version they paid for, that every 6 months he writes plaintive blog posts telling people "I'll release it in another 6 months: software is hard!"
This is the portrait of a project that's being sadly mismanaged into irrelevance, not one that's being carefully honed to perfection.
What I find amazing is the sheer cognitive dissonance of Textmate's popularity in the Ruby community; the same community that has enthusiastically embraced Agile developer practices and whose leaders tend to speak as often about the importance of good project management as they do about good coding.
Like most modern editors and IDEs, TextMate's power comes from the community of developers who extend the "out of the box" functionality.
To that end, I consider features geared toward developers to be critical.
Otherwise, it's hard to disagree that this project is embarrassingly behind schedule. I read once that the first version was only released after numerous ground-up rewrites.
Yeah, but as the previous poster said: the biggest advantage of TM is the ecosystem of plugins and environments that third-parties have developed for it. From the dev blog posts, it sounds like a lot of the stuff going into TM2 will be directly useful for people developing plugins and what-not; ergo, it's stuff that will ultimately be end-user facing. Ditto for some of the other things that the dev has been talking about (better threading support, better support for network-mounted files, etc.).
Really, though, TM1 consistently amazes me in that I don't know too many other five-year-old programs that are still as useful today as they were when they were first released.
What I consider more critical than features geared toward devs is that TextMate works as a text editor. I've been using TextMate mostly happily for years, and half of me wants to tell Allan to keep on doing what he's doing if he thinks he will get a better TM 2.0 out of it.
The other half of me is pissed off that 1.x has issues that haven't been fixed because 2.x was supposed to fix it, and while I know I don't have a right to bitch and moan and demand this, it's still frustrating. Like how non-fixed-width text does not display correctly (in this text editor). Allan had a blog post back in 2006 about how to fake CJK support and promised 2.0's ground-up rewrite with Core Text was going to solve those issues. 2006. It was also part of a series of posts about how his app was going to go Leopard-only back then, and I'm now just sitting here wondering if I'm seeing a reenaction of Duke Nukem Forever where he's doing re-re-rewrites of 2.0 because of Leopard and now Snow Leopard and...
Meanwhile, he gets so many complaints from dissatisfied users wanting a few core features added to the 1.x version they paid for, that every 6 months he writes plaintive blog posts telling people "I'll release it in another 6 months: software is hard!"
This is the portrait of a project that's being sadly mismanaged into irrelevance, not one that's being carefully honed to perfection.
What I find amazing is the sheer cognitive dissonance of Textmate's popularity in the Ruby community; the same community that has enthusiastically embraced Agile developer practices and whose leaders tend to speak as often about the importance of good project management as they do about good coding.