Dave Online

IntelliJ 11.

Was love at first sight. I’d thought the heavens had opened up and an angel had been sent down to process my every line of code like a mother tending its child. New entry screens, new splash screen, new ui chrome, and advanced code hinting/generation.

And then I tried using Git.

Branches menu item doesn’t work.
You can’t check out a branch without ( I assume, as I havent been able to ) navigating through the graphical display of the branches. What a fucking joke.
You cant get the remote branches that exist on the server that you havent already gotten via other means

I’m sure there is more, I’ve just going back to the way things were before 11 came along.

WTF Jetbrains, you dicks.

Have downloaded the sdk at home, same as I got at work today, and beginning the journey to mobile device enlightenment.

Fact is, I dont know java. thankfully, its a fairly simple language to learn so I hope to get it sorted soon. Bought the o’reilly ebook Java:the good bits thru stanza and am using that to accellerate my learning of yet another language ( seriously, whats that, 7 now ? ) so I can fully appreciate what Google has made so readily available. Loving the intellij examples and ease of use (yet again) with development of android. A visual editor seems to still be the only thing that lets fahim win arguments tho, about flashbuilder being better ( DAMN HIM ) although he also talks about visual studio like its not the spawn of satan so his opinion gets less pertinent with each passing day.

Anyway, bought the google app store registration today also so Once I figure out my app for world domination building and distributing it should be academic.

One would hope, anyway.

ps. I knoiw no-one actually reads this blog, its more of a form of self therapy, so if you do actually stumble in here, my appologies for the eclectic assortment of crazy, its not my fault, its mine. That said, I know the contstant stream of spammers may actually be privy to at least glancing views of my comments before dumping their desperate pledges of forex guides and the latest offering, anxiety meds ( pity, a little close to home there) so Hi there. Thanks for reading my salute to obscurity.

Oh yeah, Peters’s software has been accepted by a few parties now. Its only a matter of time before it required the inevitable mashup with sonar6. Or at least something performance based. I dont see it as a clash of interests if their software isn’t actually capable (or for the most part, ever will be capable) of doing actual performance analysis, in the sense of knowing whats going on with the team member, as opposed to judging them remotely through managers. Can you say honestly that your teachers ever understood you from the ages of 12 to 18 ? Of course not. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as is understanding. Unless the external party can use alpha numeric decoding. in which case anything is fair game.

Dave.

Little man has gotten himself a case of gastro. Nasty bastard virus that makes the wee ones vomit and squirt up a storm. Technically, worst thing is de-hydration, realistically, its a truely gutting thing to watch your infant child go through this shit and there is nothing you can do to help them.

Anyway, he’s in hospital now, about to go back to see him ( his mums there at the moment, I’ve been doing some work as there is nothing I can do being a spare prick at a wedding while he’s in hospital ) for an hour or two.

In other news : 47 Comments received – 47 marked as spam. even the heartfelt replies that then mention their own money trading sites… Uh, yeah, dont care, dont care what brilliant secret you were told, you are as obvious as thrush and just as desirable.

I have a pet peeve with incorrect case in classes for properties and variables, especially externally visible ones. So I wanted to change CategoryID to categoryID.

I’ve become trained, I’m a good boy, to use the “Refactor|Rename…” method to change a variable/object name now, and did this on the private variable _CategoryID in the class. This had a setter and getter generated ( by my best friend, ALT+Enter ) which provided a public interface of CategoryID.

So I uses my little refactoring tool, expecting then to have to go do the same on the public interface ( fair enough right ? ) and it goes :

“Would you like to replace property functions to ‘categoryID’ as well ?”

Which after clicking OK it goes and renames the private class variables, the public interface, and then all uses throughout my project as well.

And I felt all warm inside.

Through xavier at work I was introduced to an app called IntelliJ IDEA by a company called JetBrains.

Before this, I was using Adobe’s grossly overpriced and underfeatured FlashBuilder 4 and Eclipse Helios for my as3/flex and php respectively. To be honest I had gotten used to a reasonable but somewhat sub-par ide for my flash work, and considering the alternative was using flash itself ( I mean, wtf, get a grip adobe, some of your tools are complete pants. ) or the open source flashbuilder ( still going strong for the pricetag ).

At first glance, i thought intellij would be another freakish java based mess of too many buttons and panels, as many nerds have seen. There is a time and place for aesthetics, and sometimes that time is during development of tedious back end code. I didn’t actually want to use it for a couple of weeks, I was so hell bent on using the software that I so graciously paid adobe for the privilege of using.

[7 paragraphs of Adobe hating flaming expletives removed as an afterthought. No, I don't care what Adobe think of me, and I'll add that in my rant I stated that I'll never pay them another cent yet will remain up to date with their latest software. I just think I'll keep the language nicer in case my son reads this one day.]

Anyway, eventually I took an hour to have a poke around.

And my god, it was full of stars.

For flex, It does everything except visual mxml. And no-one needs that, plus if you change the mxml in fb4 much, you can stop the design view from working. And then you undo your changes. doesn’t work. you reset flashbuilder ( which mean waiting for a few minutes after closing the app as it doesn’t release its workspace for a while ). And it still doesn’t work. The “fix” is to make a new project and then copy your code into it. That is what adobe calls a fix. “Make a new one, from scratch, and copy your existing code (that should have been fine anyway) into the new project.” Oh look. I’m ranting about Adobe again. I promise to stop.

Anyway. Like I was saying, its minus the mxml design view. But that’s all, and its like an orgasmic cornucopia of information available to the developer all at once.

It’ll tell you where the errors are, it’ll tell you where you have changed code in the file, it’ll indicate places where your current search results are, places where current usage indicators are, and where the parts are that could be done better or perhaps you have unused declarations/imports or variables….. All in the right hand margin. The left hand margin is for things like breakpoints, colours ( use a hex code like #CFF330 in a style and it has the colour in a clickable ( selectable as in swatch!) little square in the margin, and stacks them if you have more colours declared on that line), line numbers and collapse keys ( what i call the little expand/collapse markers (+/-) that make code easier to navigate ).

It’ll indicate to you changed files, freshly added files to svn ( handles all version control systems natively ( out of the box, no third party required )), files that are in exclusion lists ( can be overwritten when you update so be careful etc ) on the 2 rows of tabs indicating what files you have open.

Its got a keyboard shortcut for pretty much anything, even a shortcut that will tell you what a shortcut is if you TYPE IN THE COMMAND OR WHAT YOU WANT TO DO !!!!

It has little panels that hang around the borders of the app, giving you access to everything from your project files, messages, uploads, chats ( built in chat integration to jabber with things like view friends files and send code pointers through it ), consoles, maven, ant,todo’s,structures…. Oh and things like debug panels have their own debug session tabs too.

Its got breakpoints which you can set up to be conditional, follow paths, heaps more.

And Its cheap. just dropped to a couple of hundred.

Oh yeah, and I’m currently using it to dev my dads php site. Later I could use it to dev and android app, organise style sheets….

You just have to check this thing out if you are a developer. Although if you are a developer, this may not actually be news to you. Lets just say I haven’t been this excited about something since I discovered softbait. And this beats that in features alone.

Thanks jetbrains, you quirky little bunch of nerds with the funny name. Developing got fun again.

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/

note that the free version ( how cool are these guys ) doesn’t do flex stuff. but you could buy a site license for less than the cost of 1 adobe flashbuilder license.

Well, have recently joined the world renowned company Sonar6. They do a performance review suite that companies can use to scope out their company in a pretty fast manner, with some pretty flash views of how everyone is going. We have made the project in flash and php, and its always evolving and being re-written in updated languages. The newest section being redone, is being done with flex, robotlegs and signals.

Now on its own, flex is a pretty interesting beast, and has a great many things going for it for your average lazy developer. One could argue that its all about efficiently pumping out software but we all know its coz yer lazy…. but that aside, flex has some pretty funky libraries and some pretty awesome shortcuts.

I’ve never really played a lot with out of box mvc frameworks, I was pleasantly surprised when I found that their basic working model was how I coded anyway, but with some things I hadn’t thought of. I’d briefly looked into and then run screaming from puremvc, perved and then shied away from MATE and glanced and thought nothing of robotlegs. I’ve now dealt with all 3. And I have to say, robotlegs is a right stunner.

We use it with signals, which I think its fair to say should be a part of robotlegs, signals leave event listeners for dead with their efficiency and easy of use ( most notably in flex ) and tied in with the injection system available in robot legs they are damn  near perfect.

With robotlegs, everything  worth noting about your app is declared in what they call a context, and its what is used as the heart of the app, its even what gets called at the start of the app. The context is a registry of all things important, be it the windows or objects you show, or the information messages you send between them via what they call commands. Commands are like independant listeners, or agents, that when a signal is fired, they then are run to do tasks to let the mediators ( window controllers ) do things. The really cool thing is that you can also hook into the system, “tapping” the line so to speak, so a signal that is destined to run some command or function will also provide a heads up to whatever you have sniffing the thing. These are also tied in with “services”, which are used to populate “models” ( data based object classes such as users or products or whatever ) so its all one throbbing organism.

For instance :

A flight booking site. A window is populated from a model as a data source, which was in turn populated from a remote amf call to a  php server. In this particular example we’d have our model “flights” that shows all the flights within a certain time and a model representing each flight that has info on the time, plane type, flight number, seat limit etc. This list would be govourned by a mediator. The mediator is responsible for making the list display the flights, responding to the flight in the list being clicked, the reload buttons etc, and for setting up the signals that get fired off if a flight is selected.

When a user clicks on the flight they want, a signal is dispatched that runs a command to open the flight info window. The signal can have all sorts of info attached to it, or nothing. Its so freaking custom its dirty. but in a good way. The signal would hold a reference to the flight ID, but could just as easily hold a copy of the flight model itself, and have all the details without needing to check on anything. The command can then call the info window, tell the mediator all about the flight ( or it can just chuck the individual flight model at it ) and in turn the mediator would manage the popup that had the info.

When a user then clicks to purchase a seat on that flight another signal can be sent off to show a boarding pass, and a seperate class which also has hooks in that purchase signal can send a message through a service to record the fact the seat has been chosen.

And due to the awesome versatility of signals, if we for some reason wanted a little status window at the bottom what watched everything the user was doing, its easy. all injection, no messy event additions all through every object.

To be honest, its just awesome, and I’ll likely never build another application without it. I’m even considering adopting the flex thing as an easy alternative to actually working on projects….

Robotlegs, its a winner.

ipad + garageband = love.

And its bloody cancelled.

I must admit, from the moment we met, I knew that we would have a patchy relationship, but one that would go on for years.

I’m talking about lynda.com, the learning video site. Its all about software of course, not how to paint or use the guitar, but its fantastic, up to date and pretty fairly priced really, about $30 kiwi a month ( its in US dollars, $25 for just teh vids and $37 to include exercise files ). No way save the videos down tho* but its still good value and the lessons (which do vary but for flash/flex/actionscript) are well thought out and easy to follow. Anyway, thats all for now….

In other news : Insurance companies suck, mortgages are weird and we need to pick a different car to a terrano.

Now if drupal had a control panel as clean and straight forward as the wordpress one, it’d probably squash joomla outright. But it doesn’t. So it wont.

In other news, the drive came back from seagate today, and the powers that be allowed me to keep all the data that I should have been backing up but hadn’t. Small miracles. Kinda blown away when the email from ups took over 2 weeks to come through, then the package went to singapore, got fixed and returned in the same week. like, picked up monday, back at my doorstep on thursday morning. insane. UPS definately has the goods.