Hi there,
I just recently came across SlickEdit and since I've moved from Windows to Mac, I considered using SlickEdit as a partial Visual Studio replacement (partial because it lacks the UML support I have with UModel 2008 under Visual Studio). I will still use Visual Studio on the Mac under VMWare (Windows XP / Windows 2003 Server) for Web development and modelling, but having a nice native development environment for the Mac would definitely be very cool. And from the feature-set it looks like SlickEdit is well worth the money.
I almost bought SlickEdit right away because this feature-set really looks convincing - but fortunately decided to check out the trial first ... and oh my, was my disappointment big when I saw this ugly X11 interface. I hope I don't hurt anyone's feelings by saying this, but SlickEdit on Mac really reminds me of those old, ugly Solaris days I had at University. Side by side with the fancy Mac OS UI, an X11 application simply looks like a relict from the last century. Welcome to XEmacs (who needs an OS anyways) ;-)
So... are there any plans on porting SlickEdit to Cocoa?
I understand that this is probably a significant amount of work and you may have "more imporant things to do". But at the moment, SlickEdit on the Mac simply looks like some cheap open source product. That doesn't mean it's not high quality software under the hood (I'm sure it is) - but to me, it was like "ouch, remove this from my HD immediately". I'm afraid X11 and slick is an oxymoron to me, and it seems I'm not the only one. You can call me spoiled, if you wish - but when I code, I want something nice to look at. Functional, of course (not sure if X11 can be called that ... maybe it was 20 years ago) - but it should definitely not hurt my eyes.
So, for now, I'll stay with Visual Studio. But I'll keep checking back because I definitely would like to have SlickEdit for the Mac and maybe some day it will be available (I mean, a "real" Mac version)... Until then, I'm afraid the Mac is simply not useful for coding (C# ... if I was still doing a lot of Java, I might consider Eclipse which I think is as rather powerful IDE). Thank God we have VMWare and Parallels... Interestingly, unlike X11 apps, Windows XP applications look pretty sweet on the Mac (and they integrate just as well) ;-)
Sunny regards,
Jashan