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Introducing Balthisar Tidy for Work

I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce Balthisar Tidy for Work to you, including a description of the features that make it different from the standard Balthisar Tidy, as well as take some time to explain why I’ve decided to charge a price for it in the App Store.

What more do I get?

Certainly Balthisar Tidy for Work does everything that the standard Balthisar Tidy does, but as a paying user your expectation is that paid software do something that free software can’t do. Balthisar Tidy for Work should meet that expectation.

You get AppleScript support. This opens a whole automation ecosystem to you. You can use Balthisar Tidy for Work to tidy up hundreds or thousands of files at a time. You can use Folder Actions to automatically tidy files put into folders. The possibilities are endless.

If you prefer to accomplish your automation on the command line, then you will certainly appreciate Balthisar Tidy for Work’s ability to generate Tidy configuration files. Now you can use Balthisar Tidy’s beautiful interface to experiment with and find the settings that deliver the result you want, and very simply use those same settings with command line Tidy on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and anywhere else that Tidy is supported. (Do note, however, that most distributions use an old version of Tidy that might not support all the features that Balthisar Tidy supports.

Beyond version 2.0 I expect to add even more professional and power-user features to the for Work branch of Balthisar Tidy.

Why “for Work”?

I think that Balthisar Tidy Pro sounds too ambitious. Tidy is, in its essence, just a simple app that does one thing very well. By using for Work I'm really hoping that you professional users out there will be encouraged to buy a paid license, or work with your purchasing departments to have them purchase dozens or hundreds of copies.

Why charge for it?

I’m happy to pay all of the costs to bring Balthisar Tidy to the world. My “day job” takes care of enough of my bills that I get more pleasure from delivering a superb tool than I would I would ever get from earning a little bit of money (HTML Tidying programs are a niche product, after all).

However there are a lot of non-English users in the world, and I would really like to make Balthisar Tidy much easier for them to use, too. Every time it’s mentioned in a book, a lot of requests come in for a native-language version.

Thus, all proceeds of sales of Balthisar Tidy for Work will be used to pay for language localizations. If you’re a user in China and want to have a Simplified Chinese version of the application, it will be very helpful if your company purchases 100 copies.

Can’t I just steal it?

Yes. There's no certificate checking done on the App Store version of Balthisar Tidy for Work, so it should be very easy to simply take a copy from a paid user. And of course since Balthisar Tidy (including for Work) is open source, all of the source code is sitting right there on Github.

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