Linux

The usability gap and effects gap between Windows and Linux, in my opinion have shrunk. And that comment comes in lieu of my recent conversion to Linux.

I must admit, I'm quite sold on the Linux platform. Currently I'm using Ubuntu as it has some preloaded drivers which eased my setup. However, what more can you really ask. Just installing Beryl has already replicated or nearly replicated Windows Vista functionality.

Moreover, it is really fast. Much faster than Windows. Although there have been occasional crashes, and slightly more than Windows due to some hardware incompatibility as I have alot of "Designed for Windows XP" hardware. However, on the whole, its usable and software is really easy to obtain.

Compiling software isn't such a pain either...
GO LINUX!!

Google Gears

Google is now on the path to making its Web-based apps available offline.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. For now, it consists components called LocalServer, Database and WorkerPool.

Only the Google Reader will be made for offline use for now. However, as time goes on, other useful applications such as Docs and Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail will be put for offline use.
With the talk about a Google Presentation Software (see my previous post), the bringing of these applications offline could post a serious competition to Microsoft in the future.

For interested developers, take a look at Google Gears Developer Website: http://code.google.com/apis/gears/index.html

Google Gears (Beta) can be found at: http://tools.google.com/gears/

Let's Go Open Source: Eclipse IDE

All Programmers have heard of dreamweaver I'm sure. However, for budget programmers like me, I prefer to go the open source way. The tools I use for designing web pages, from Graphics to the coding are all open source software.

In the first Let's G.O.S. feature in this site, the software here which has been an integral part of my programming toolkit: the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE).

The Eclipse SDK (Software Development Kit) is the core of the IDEs. It features a framework which allows for IDEs to run. It is an open source and software independent framework. As such, you can run eclipse in most operating systems.

The Eclipse SDK comes with the Java IDE. However, it aims to be more than a Java IDE. It aims to be part of the entire software development cycle.

Eclipse has a large community of users, constantly extending the covered application areas. It is focused on building an extensible development platform, runtimes and application frameworks for building, deploying and managing software across the entire software lifecycle.

However, since my work is web-oriented, my IDE of choice is the PHP-IDE. Here is a screenshot of the Eclipse IDE:



There are various plugins and gems which can be found at the Eclipse Foundation website at http://www.eclipse.org

On top of that. If you're a Flex developer, Adobe's Flex is also able to integrate into the Eclipse environment..