Thursday, June 30, 2011

Mockito for Suneido

From the Couch 12 - Mockito for Suneido

I've been using Mockito for writing tests for jSuneido and I really like it.

So I decided to write something like it for Suneido ...more

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Upgrading to Eclipse Indigo

The latest version of the Eclipse IDE, version 3.7 named Indigo, was release a few days ago.

For me, this was the smoothest upgrade so far. My jSuneido project still seems to build just fine, and the tests still all succeed.

All but one of the plugins I use was available through the Eclipse Marketplace (under the Help menu). Going through the Marketplace is a lot easier than the old style of entering a URL for an update site. The plugin that was not available has not been marked as compatible with Indigo, not surprising as it doesn't seem to be under active development. There are other metrics plugins, but the nice thing about this one is that it also displayed dependencies graphs. But it's probably the plugin I use least, so it wasn't a big deal. The other plugins I use (that were available) are: Bytecode Outline (for ASM), EclEmma Code Coverage, FindBugs, and MercurialEclipse.

I haven't really noticed any major improvements, but I'm sure there are some.

The only minor annoyance I noticed was that it spent a long time at first downloading the Maven indexes. Maven support is built in now, but my project doesn't use it, so I'm not sure why it needed to download the indexes. But even this wasn't a big deal since it happened in the background. (I just noticed it in the Progress view and in my network activity.) I tried to use Maven another time but just made a mess and gave up. Maybe I should try again now that support is built in.

If my experience is typical, then I wouldn't be afraid to upgrade.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Are ten apps all you need?

Ten apps is all I need - (37signals)

I disagree. I regularly use a bunch of non-Apple apps e.g. offline Wikipedia, iBird, oMaps, Topo Maps, Evernote, MobileRSS, BlogPress, TripIt, Photoshop Express, Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, SmartGo. *

I agree no one needs hundreds of thousands of apps. But you need a large selection in order to find the ones you want - you need the long tail. It's the same problem when you try to reduce the number of features in software. Sure, no one person uses all the features, but different people use different features.

The popularity of the platform draws the developers that you need to get the apps you want.

One of the big things that would stop me from using another phone or tablet (e.g. Android) would be the availability of the apps that I want.

PS. I'd also disagree with listing the Weather app as one that Apple "nailed".  It's very basic and I don't find it very useful. I believe it's getting updated in IOS 5.

* A number of these I use because they work offline. Outside Canada, or even out of town, I don't have constant connectivity.