OSXCon: Development Lessons from Bare Bones Software

Jeremy Zawodny reports from the OS X Conference on Bare Bones Software: “BB is a strange company, as they’ve been Mac-only and have been in business for over 10 years. Haven’t gone out of business, gone public, or been bought. It’s very rare. They make a living doing Mac-only. So it can be done.”

When people ask me about the business I’m building, I tell them I’m following the BBEdit model.

Some lessons I’ve learned from BBEdit: do a Lite version and keep it free; care about quality, care about bugs and stability; listen carefully to your users; don’t let your app do too much (but don’t let it do too little); implement scriptability; and add plug-in support when appropriate.