soledad penadés

repeat 4[fd 100 rt 90]

Bricksmith es un programa para Mac que te permite jugar a Lego en tu ordenador. Y he de confesar que eso de tener todas las piezas posibles de Lego a tu alcance no merece otro adjetivo más que superadictivo.

El manejo al principio se hace un poco raro, hasta que te das cuenta de que las teclas de los cursores desplazan los objetos en ejes que dependen de la rotación actual. Es decir, depende de como hayas rotado la vista, pulsar la tecla de "izquierda" puede tanto desplazar en el eje X un elemento en el sentido positivo, como en el eje Y en negativo… El comportamiento va cambiando automáticamente.

Finalmente, he de reconocer, también, que yo era de Tente, y que en mi vida he tocado una pieza de Lego real. Pero a falta de tente, buenos son legos, … ¡o bricksmiths!

Encontrado en Microsiervos.

Although they fixed the word wrap thingie in latest versions of Eclipse (did they read my desperate call, maybe?), I still miss a pair of good features:

1. split the editor view in two, having let's say two subwindows inside the current one, and then being able to see the same file twice but at different parts. Or maybe, to be able to see two different files in the splitted view. Currently I am just able to switch between files with tabs, which are nice but sometimes I would like to have everything in screen at the same time.
2. change the editor font. I am bored with Courier New, there are better fonts for showing source code, and although I have been looking around all the possible preferences I thought of (I take this opportunity to remark that the preferences Pane is horribly messy and confusing… I always get lost at it… where was that option? was under php? or under general editors?), I haven't been able to find where to change the font. Ok, you can change the style (color, bold, italic) but not the font. I want my Lucida Console back!

These features are present in another IDE's like Visual Studio or XCode, and they increase [my] productivity, so I don't find any reason to not to have them in this one. Specially if their developers really want it to be superwidespread.

Which powerfeature would you add to Eclipse?

Once you have installed Firefox 1.5 on your system, you absolutely feel the need to drag and drop items in your Task Bar (for the miserable people like me which has to work with a windows box) and close programs by clicking over them with the middle button. And then is when you feel sooooo badly because Windows won't allow you to change the order of items in the task bar, or close them as you expect after using our lovely browser for some minutes.

They have also changed something else in the rendering engine and now some fonts appear certainly weird - like if the kerning is not properly calculated. I didn't notice this in the mac version…. I will have a look later to verify it… of course I am not expecting such a good rendering and antialias like the one Safari does, but this is simply not nice, although doesn't stop you from enjoying even faster navigation and rendering times.

So… is it worth the download? Deffinitely YES!

The most important extensions (for me) like web developer toolbar, view rendered source and a theme I use for resemble mac feeling (AquaFox), work on 1.5, as well as FCKEditor or JSCalendar, which are components I use day by day. So there's nothing that prevents me to keep working with it, and that won't prevent you from working as well :-)

What's better than a Cube? A rounded cube!

After my I-hate-all-webmails post (sorry, in Spanish), I must recognize I have found one which is pretty decent (also very mac-ish): Round Cube.

It's still in alpha but works greatly and nicely, super ajax powered… and it's so clean…!

If you want to try it, use these installation instructions. Pretty straightforward.

A MUST have - I think it'll become the web2.0 webmail program ;-)

I started developing code with subethaedit. It's not bad, considering that the personal, non commercial edition is free, but somehow the lack of a tree with all the files and its folders (like visual studio, eclipse, etc) annoys me.

So I started with skEdit, which is quite nice (although I really *hate* to have to close all the files when it has to refresh. It's painful), but it's not free and the demo version is limited to 25 days only. A big problem I found is that it can't syntax highlight ruby (.rb) files. So it's as useless as coding with textpad.

Then I finally found RadRails. It's based on Eclipse, but it's well adapted and very easy to "install" (i.e., it has no installation, you just drag and drop it to the applications folder, at least on Mac Os X <3 <3). It has nice syntax highlighting and the files/folder tree feature, and no need to close all files to refresh the tree, so by the moment it's more than enough for my needs. Also, I haven't tested it, but the page states that it works on linux and windows as well. It doesn't eat resources as eclipse does. I think it's worth a try.

I'd like to have a look at TextMate but for some weird reason I wrongly downloaded an expired version from the wrong page and it has decided that my test license has expired and never allows me to have a test with a new version, downloaded from their original web. I promise I never tried to crack it, just downloaded it from a wrong page :-(
Shame on the author for not taking care of the distribution of the program, and not appearing on the first place on google searchs!

Maybe one day I'll write them and ask. If I like it (I liked it after seeing the video [link to a MOV file]) maybe I would buy it. Or not: let's see how I work with radrails…