Eclipse Rocks!

I'm a BIG fan of the amazing Aptana Studio, and since discovering it, I've hardly used my old weapon of choice, Dreamweaver. Aptana is much more "code-focussed", and great for building AJAX and DHTML applications and widgets (Web 2.0 developement anyone?)

After playing with Aptana, I have made a bit of a change however. I have installed the Eclipse IDE (which Aptana is based on), then installed the Aptana plugin for Eclipse. This means I get all the Aptana goodness, with the added bonus of being able to use any of the dozens of Eclipse plugins, such as SQL Explorer (useful if you do any Database work), Visual Paradigm SDE (for UML and Diagramming, among other things) and many more.

If you are looking for the ultimate development tool, give Eclipse a whirl, and build your own personalised toolkit, all in one IDE.

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More Web 2.0 Rambling...

Well, those of you who have read some of my previous articles, will know by now that I am not entirely happy with the whole "Web 2.0" thing, but I found this today, and thought it might be of interest to somebody. Web2Rain is basically a big list of tools that designers and developers may find useful.

While I hate the "Web 2.0" hype, I love how websites are becoming more and more interactive, in more useful and interesting ways, and some of the sites you will find here really demonstrate my point. Ignore the slogan " A list of tools, that makes web development easy" - Good web design and development is anything but easy!

Oo, oo, oo, a shiny new workstation!

Yay! After moaning about my completely pants workstation at the office, we all have new machines. I am well pleased! As I hate waiting, I have spent the last 3 months or so, lugging my huge Toshiba laptop backwards and forwards to the office, as it is a much faster machine than my office machine. Not any more!

Our new boxes have 4 gigs of RAM, quad processors, nice big hard drives, the new NVidia videocards, with loads of dedicated VRAM, outputting to 2 rather tasty 19" Widescreen LCD flat-panels, with my fave new feature, NVidia's NVRotate, which allows you to pivot your display(s) to portrait view!

This means I can now, at last, have a full 1024 * 768 browser window open, and if it's Firefox, immediately below it, I can have a decent sized Firebug, then on the other monitor, Aptana, with a full 1280 height window for coding! NICE. A real productivity improvement.

Plus the fact, I will stop walking with a stoop as I will be able to leave the beast at home!

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