Tiger Early Adopter: Bare Bones Embraces Automator

Always prompt to take on appropriate new Apple technologies, Bare Bones Software has embraced Automator, the personal automation assistant introduced in Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger. Automator Actions are supported in the new version of BBEdit, Bare Bones' highly respected, widely used, award-winning HTML and text editor. The 12-year-old company has won numerous awards, has a famously loyal customer base, and an impressive track record of both design and business success. Part of that success may be attributable to their ability to quickly ship products that support the key features of the newest versions of Mac OS X.

With Automator, you drag and drop discrete functions known as Actions into custom Workflows that automate simple or complex tasks. Tiger ships with more than 200 Actions for standard Apple applications and system functions; third-party software developers can add their own—and that's just what Bare Bones Software has done. Shipped at the same time as Tiger, BBEdit version 8.2 adds a rich suite of BBEdit Actions to the Automator library of Actions, including adding or deleting line numbers, changing case, concatenating words, converting tabs to spaces, searching and replacing, straightening quotes, zapping gremlins, and more.

With this impressive arsenal of text processing tools, users can put together some nifty Workflows. How about automatically creating a BBEdit document that lists DVD releases for the current month? Start by subscribing iCal to the DVD new release service. This captures the raw data into your iCal. Build your Workflow by first selecting iCal Actions to Find Events and create an Event Summary. With Automator Actions in BBEdit, you can pass the resulting information to a series of BBEdit Actions that use Grep search and replace, and line sorting to construct a plain-text BBEdit document with a complete listing of the upcoming DVD releases for the month. Happy viewing!

Adding support for Automator to BBEdit was not a steep climb for Bare Bones. One reason, according to Rich Siegel, Bare Bones Founder and CEO, was all the work done earlier to support scriptability in the application.

“BBEdit 6, which we released near the end of 2000, was fully scriptable, recordable and attachable, ” says Siegel; “so we didn't really have an enormous amount of engineering that needed to be done to integrate with Automator. It wasn't a weekend hack, but it wasn't weeks of intense engineering work, either.”

Automation is no stranger to BBEdit itself. Version 8.0 of the product introduced Text Factories, a visual tool for creating a series of transformations on text. Text Factories let you use BBEdit as an automation solution from start to finish. Automator lets you bring multiple applications to the party. “We see Text Factories and Automator as complementary, mirror images of each other,” Siegel comments. “Both are going to be very attractive to leading-edge users putting together advanced workflows.”

Life on the Leading Edge

Being quick on the uptake in adopting new Apple technologies is nothing new for Bare Bones. The first developer to ship a commercial application for Mac OS X, the company has a notable history of accomplishments on the leading edge of software development, including early or first support for native execution on PowerPC, AOCE and Macintosh Drag and Drop on Mac OS 9, and the Web Kit framework in a commercial application.

“We are always evaluating new technologies from Apple,” Siegel says. “Early technology support is good for both our businesses. It provides critical new capabilities to our customers and frequently gives them a reason to buy Macs. We've seen people who keep Macs just so they can keep running BBEdit.”

The BBEdit customer base is remarkably diverse—web designers, web back-end developers, software developers, engineers, scientists, people building enterprise solutions, and many others. In many cases, Siegel notes, it’s impossible to directly address all the needs these customers bring up. So providing new features, such as scripting, or Text Factories, or support for Automator, is an effective way to give BBEdit users control of their own situation and let them get the particular results they want.

More than Hot Technologies

Of course, the Bare Bones success story involves a lot more than just being early to market with whizzy new features. It means paying attention to less glamorous aspects of a product.

“We put a lot of energy into parts of the software that aren’t as visible, but which really matter: performance, stability, and scalability,” Siegel says. “Ironically, many people think these are secondary considerations, and too many developers just pay lip service to these points. We give customers reliable software that does what they need to do.”

This close attention to software engineering fundamentals has resulted in BBEdit’s mile-high reputation in the Macintosh community. Recently, a top Mac developer (Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software, the developers of NetNewsWire) was quoted in an interview as saying that if he ever saw BBEdit crash he would be convinced “the sky was falling.” “That’s the kind of reputation for reliability that we’re really proud of,” says Siegel, “and we will continue to uphold the traditions that got us there.”

Giving Customers What They Need

With a diverse, articulate, and knowledge base of high power users, you can imagine the intense level of feedback and enhancement requests that come in the door at Bare Bones. How to deal with this?

Siegel points out that just giving customers what they say they want is not always the best way to go. Instead, Bare Bones makes a concerted effort to understand what they really need.

“What are these customers trying to accomplish? What problem are they trying to solve? What do they need—not what are they asking for?” Siegel asks. “These are the recurring questions we think about whenever we're looking at a new feature or considering an enhancement request from a customer. Rather than just putting a feature in there for its own sake, we have to understand the problem it solves.”

As an example, Siegel mentions the case of tabbed windows. Many BBEdit customers were requesting a tabbed interface, similar to the tabs in Safari and other web browsers. Bare Bones took a close look and decided that tabs were fine for web browsers, but not appropriate for managing multiple documents. The real need was to handle several BBEdit documents at the same time without cluttering up the screen with lots of windows. To solve this problem, Bare Bones introduced the Documents Drawer and Navigation Bar for text windows in BBEdit 8.0. “We looked at the underlying problem, not just the superficial request,” Siegel says, “and as a consequence these new features have been very well accepted in the BBEdit community.”

Overall, Siegel comments, Bare Bones does not believe in piling in features to make a check list. “Our features go in,” he says, “because they address technological or customer needs, not just because we think they're cool.”

Measuring Success

Asked to share some metrics demonstrating the success of Bare Bones, Siegel comments: “I think our biggest observable metric is the sheer number of happy customers we have. We've been in business for 12 years—you can’t stay in business that long without having a satisfied, loyal, and happy customer base.”

Bare Bones has seen steady year-over-year growth. In fact, the company has never had a layoff, even in the darkest moments of the dot-com debacle. As well, the company has never had to outsource or perform any of the cut-it-back-to-the-ground pruning that some companies had to resort to, often at the expense of good customer relations and good customer service. “That’s a sacrifice Bare Bones is not willing to make,” Siegel comments.

Keeping a Balance

How does a busy, successful software engineer and executive keep his life in balance? Siegel is famous among his friends for his love of driving, fine food, and music—in no particular order. All these outside interests help him stay in balance, which "becomes more and more important as we get older,” he notes. “Of course, it doesn't matter how much fun you’re having in the off hours, if you’re suffering on the job,” Siegel says. “I still look forward to coming to the office.”

For more information about Bare Bones Software, see www.barebones.com

For more information about Automator, see the Automator page

BBEdit Boxshot

Automator is a major advance in the effort to persuade your applications and files to do what you want them to do, as Bare Bones is showing with integration of Automator Actions into BBEdit.

Combining the power of UNIX pipelining, easy access to a wide range of system resources and applications, and an dynamic and informative visual interface, Automator is taking thousands of Mac users to new and unexpected levels of power usage. The way most of us perform routine tasks on our Macs is going to change—in a big and significant way.

What should Macintosh developers be doing about Automator? “Every Mac developer should really give Automator serious consideration,” says Sal Soghoian, Automation Product Manager at Apple. “It’s a great way to add value and grow your market. Think about it: Once your application is part of someone’s automated workflow, that customer is not going to casually switch to a different vendor. Best of all, thinking in terms of Automator and workflows gives you a chance to do what you do best, and let other applications do the rest.”

Here are some points about Automator to consider: You can create Actions in any kind of code—Perl, Python, Java, C—not just AppleScript. You can create Actions that make use of any framework supported by Mac OS X, including the Core Image, Core Video, Core Audio, and Core Data frameworks. You can create Actions with Automator Xcode templates included in Tiger.

How do you develop Actions for your application? There are two approaches: If you have your own set of accessible frameworks, you can use Objective-C and write Actions that talk directly to the frameworks. If your application is scriptable, you can use Apple Events to communicate with your program.

In case your software isn’t scriptable or doesn’t have an accessible framework, becoming scriptable is probably the easiest way to get started with Automator development.

“BBEdit 6, which we released near the end of 2000, was fully scriptable, recordable and attachable,” says Siegel. “So we didn't really have an enormous amount of engineering that needed to be done to integrate with Automator.”