Where do I start...? Let's start with IDEs. I am *not* an Eclipse fanboy. There are many things I don't like about it -- starting with the workspace concept, and lots of annoying bugs and behaviors.
I -was- a NetBeans fan. That was not because I was "a company man", but because I personally worked on it for several years, I knew many of the core developers, I filed hundreds if not thousands of bugs over the years which meant that over time the IDE improved and removed many of the things that initially annoyed me, so the IDE worked really well for -me-. I'm having to do a lot of XML editing these days and I think the XML editor in Eclipse leaves a lot to be desired. However, it doesn't seem to me that Oracle really has its heart in it anymore, so I've mentally moved on. Now that I'm working on Android I've given Eclipse a deeper look than in the past, and after a few weeks I found myself productive with it. Six months in I'm just as productive as I was with NetBeans -- the Eclipse Java editor is very strong, and I've rewired all my motorskills to deal with the Eclipse keybindings and workflow. In short, I'm liking it, not with the same level of passion that I had for NetBeans when I worked on core editing stuff for JavaScript and Ruby, but nevertheless I can code and have fun with it. Now, I think what has irritated more listeners is that I'm praising Android a lot more on the podcast. But if you'll listen to older episodes, you'll find that when I got my first iphone, and later my ipad, I praised those too. They were much better than what I had before, and I enjoyed using them a lot. I still find them to be very good products. Does that make me a "traitor" for suddenly deciding that I like Android better? No! It's pragmatic. I have already mentioned on the podcast why I now prefer Android -- but in case you missed that episode, to me features like the speech keyboard, vector mobile maps, and notification are "killer" features that I use -all- the time and they'e more important to me than the thickness of the device. And it's by no means the only feature. For me, something as simple as browsing and installing apps on the phone is just a lot better. On the ipad, as soon as I've picked an app to install, clicking "Install" will -exit- the app store, scroll the home screen 5 pages to the right and "show me" the icon for the app which is downloading. Which of course I can't click because it's not done downloading yet. On Android, clicking install starts the install but takes you back to the previous page such that you can continue scrolling down the charts and seeing what else to try. For -me-, and for the features I use, it's just a better experience. That doesn't mean I think it's the same for everybody. But I think it's unfair to label this as "paycheck fanboy-ism" when I'm making it very clear what I prefer about it. There are many technologies at Google, and there were many technologies at Oracle and Sun that I never talked about. I don't think I spout the party line. When I like something, I talk about it. I mean, come on, I've even talked about ABBA! Repeatedly! -- Tor P.S. Chris -- I do use both vi and emacs regularly! But never for code editing. Vim for quick file edits, usually config files, and emacs for macros and filetypes like markdown. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
