May 11th, 2008

Of late I’ve been using Aptana Studio for some of my experiments at home. I’ve been using the Community Edition, which is free, but doesn’t have some of the features of the full Pro version. Overall it’s a good product, but not quite to my tastes.

What is good is that it also does CSS and HTML validation as you type, creating closing tags as you open them and generally looks after markup in a sensible way. Its fairly intelligent code completion also includes support for Javascript, and with a free plugin, PHP. It plays quite nicely with libraries like Jquery too, allowing for quick insertion into new projects. It also does Ruby on Rails if that’s your framework of choice.

You can flip to embedded browser previews from code view, which is nice. Then there’s how it integrates with Firebug, which is quite a handy thing for doing any AJAX/JS work. Given that the project I’ve been working on with it uses a lot of Javascript and PHP, it seems to be quite suited to that. Actually its JSON features might have been handy too, but are only in the pro version. Similarly you’re limited to plain old FTP (as opposed to SFTP) with the community version.

Aptana Studio’s not as visually slick as something like Dreamweaver, and I think this is probably its biggest flaw. It certainly isn’t as designer friendly, and I found the interface a bit clunky and unpolished in places. Sometimes you’re just not sure what an icon is supposed to mean, something compounded by slow tooltips. Another example, its file browsing window is often slow to refresh if you drag a file into a folder outside the app itself. It also seems a bit slow in OSX, especially at starting up.

So, not quite the development environment for me, but worth a look if you need an open source space for coding webpages.

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May 6th, 2008

Ah, wait… Hold on a sec, the stabiliser’s gone. Damn valves!

*sounds of banging*

That’s better. Those PNG lads require a bit of wrangling. Had to solder some bits on behind, and re-route to a different parallel for those Internet Explorer 6 chaps (61.85.13 for those who understand such things). Can’t have them thinking things are broken, just because they insist on living in the last century!

*Sounds of dangerous creaking.*

Ahem! Where was I? Oh, yes, this is my new-look place on this here ether-web. It goes by the name of Neo-Victorian Glass, a theme somewhat steampunk, somewhat victoriana, somewhat something else… It may well be held together by sheer bloody-mindedness. Do let me know if you spot any gaps, eh?

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March 17th, 2008

Five years ago glasshaus went the way of the dodo. I swear it seems like it was yesterday…  I was working there as a technical editor at the time, a diversion from web development following a dot-com redundancy. I was hoping publishing would be more stable. Somewhat ironic, considering.

It was a great job. It’d flown me to the USA for Web Design World ‘02 and shoved me into the deep end with standards (hey, you can’t edit folks work without knowing the subject inside out). I was working with great folks like Chris, Bruce and Simon and helping edit great books.

To say it had an impact would be an understatement. It left me with an abiding passion for web standards and accessibility in particular. I was gutted when in came to an end.

Five years on standards and usability are more the norm than ever before. It’s easier to learn the right ways straight off. Looking at the state of web development today there’s a seam of glasshaus running through it. Hell, I remember a meeting where we decided to start using the term Web Professional for our audience, and that seems to have stuck.

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