Hi, I'm Bryan.

History

I'm 28 and in grad school for an MBA. I started my own business as a web designer/developer before that. I wanted to use Less in my projects, so I wrote Less.app. I put it up online and thought maybe 12 people would use it. Turns out, it was more popular.

People often emailed me and asked if I would create a "Sass.app" or a "CoffeeScript.app". This past summer, in lieu of doing an official MBA internship, I wrote CodeKit. It went through many revisions and I ended up rewriting large chunks of it because I wanted to add some unanticipated piece here or there. Then school started back up and I had to work in my spare time, so it's taken me a lot longer than I thought it would to get the app out the door.

My Philosophy

I tried to create an app that would make Panic or Wil Shipley proud. I know I've fallen a bit short; there are still rough edges and missing elements. But I'm just one guy working in my spare time while going through grad school. If I waited until I was perfectly content with everything, the app would never ship. So I'm releasing CodeKit today, rough edges and all. Over time, I will iterate and improve until Wil and Cabel Sassar weep tears of joy at mere screenshots of CodeKit.

It's Not Just Me

CodeKit would not be possible without the work of a great many other people. These folks often made changes to their projects simply to accommodate my app and I would have been lost without their assistance. Open the about window to see who they are and, if you use their creations, please give them some cash — they absolutely deserve it.

The Technology

Since this app is targeted at developers, you might be interested in the tech behind it. CodeKit is a fully modern Cocoa application. It's built on Core Data and uses Grand Central Dispatch to do nearly everything in a threaded environment. (If you open Activity Monitor on a modern Mac, you might see CodeKit using 80+ threads as it rips through large projects!) It's written almost entirely in Objective-C, although to be extra fast I dropped down to pure C for some heavy tasks such as parsing @import statements in files. It also uses Google's V8 Javascript engine and Webkit's JavascriptCore engine to power some elements. Bottom line: this thing was written by a guy who knows Mac OS X. You can be sure it's a solid app.

Why Isn't CodeKit Free/Open?

The simple answer is that building CodeKit was a holy metric ton of work. I gave up a paid summer internship to take a chance on this app. CodeKit was my job. And while I certainly love and appreciate all the free software in the world, I have to make a living. When you purchase CodeKit, you're helping me pay off my student loans; I'm not trying to buy a Ferrari.

Thank You

Thanks for considering CodeKit! I hope you enjoy using it as much as I enjoyed making it.