Recently, version 7 of Zend Studio was released. Very unhappy with version 6, but previously satisfied with Zend 5.5, I decided to give it another chance to see if they had any luck improving the user experience.

Zend charges you $399 per year to use this software. They’ve got a standard toolkit for every php developer from phpunit support, documentation support, subversion support, code galleries, etc. These would be very useful if Zend had not gotten the user experience part all wrong. For $399 per year, they better have some great advantage over FREE competitors like NetBeans IDE.

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After an hour of searching, I found that the problem for me was that java 1.5 on mac was forcing netbeans to run in 64bit mode which was causing it to crash before it even opened.

By following the instructions (reposted with more info) at http://blogs.sun.com/yakshaving/entry/netbeans_will_not_start_on) I was able to get things resolved. As far as I can tell, I have not affected anything else I have.