Good day to you! I hope you were not expecting an actual release? Because that would be just silly. There is not a perfect IDE for GNOME stack AND Vala yet. However, I'd like to share with you some features that I'd like to see in a great IDE for Vala and GNOME libs.
* Proper Vala completion, IntelliSense-style The best I've seen of that is the obnoxious ValaToys completion which did not parse documentation comments and acquired symbols only from opened files. What I'd like to see is a proper code completion engine, with trees for most common VAPIs and option to add more. Such trees should also contain documentation spinnets. I think Eclipse has something along these lines for Java (never used it though, I don't personally use Java). Also, why not go a step further, and parse the doc-style comments for local symbols? I'm referencing IntelliSense, because I dabbled in C# back in the day, and I think Microsoft nailed this very well. * Better UI designer Glade is awesome as it is, but it could be so much more! Currently, Glade does not have styling support, or a way to create your own widgets other than "Add without toplevel". Additionally, Glade integration in Anjuta is not that great, and adding custom widgets to the palette requires root privileges which some people may not have. (source: http://askubuntu.com/questions/30496/how-to-add-a-pygtk-widget-to-the-glade-palette ) The new UI designer should use GtkBuilder/Glade files, but have support for local catalogues. * Version Control support Pretty self-explanatory. Fortunately, most IDEs have it. * GResource and GSettings schema editor You know what was awesome in .NET on Visual C#/Basic/C++/Whatever? The fact that there was a resource editor and program settings schema editor built into one. Now, GResource and GSettings are two different things, so this may not work that way, but designing these is a process that may benefit from a special tool. * Proper Vala debugger That one's important. I can technically debug with GDB, but it only gets me so far. A better solution is needed. * Automatic dependency processor You know what's BS? Having to add "using Gtk;", and then _having to add Gtk to your compilation flags_! There should be a little program which looks at the Vala files before compilation, and adds the packages corresponding with the top level namespaces you're using in your code. * (Windows-specific) Support for installer script generation On Windows, the preferred way of distributing software is via installers, be it EXE or MSI. If Vala is technically cross-platform, then support for generating installer scripts should be there, be it for NSIS or straight-up Windows Installer. * (Linux-specific) Package generation On Linux, the preferred way of distributing software is via packages, be it DEB, RPM or any other format. I think if there is an installer generator for Windows, then there should be a package generator for most popular Linux distros, too. These are the features I'd like to see in a perfect GNOME-centric IDE, with emphasis on Vala. These features are not impossible, too. What do you guys think?
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