I’ve used Firefox since it was Phoenix, and before that I used Mozilla, and before that I used the Netscape line. Firefox 3.x began feeling slower than I liked and it seems to quickly consume memory in such a way that by the end of the day, I had to quit and restart it. I switched to Chrome for Mac for the past two months or more and am finally switching back to Firefox. Here’s why.
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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.
In several recent projects we attempted to replace Tinymce as the leading content editor of choice with the much simpler Nicedit. We did not have any great need for the advanced features Tinymce offers and were looking for a much smaller, easier, faster tool.
While I’ve used nicedit before in basic situations and had no problems, I encountered several fatal issues which caused us to revert to Tinymce.
Inner-DIV Implementation
Nicedit creates a new DIV element that relies on some newer HTML features to work properly. Multiple issues stemmed from this, but the primary problem was that all CSS from parent elements would cascade into the DIV, thus forcing me to reset or modify some of them.
Tinymce uses an iframe which is a completely new document, so all CSS does not filter through. This also helps avoid the following content problems.
API
When ajax load/save techniques were used, there were problems with how Nicedit would copy it’s content back to the textarea, thus requiring extra programming. The API documentation is not that great, so it was a little difficult.
Elements Used
In firefox, Nicedit would use a different set of markup elements than it would in IE, making the output harder to predict. This issue is partly due to the use of the Inner-DIV and contenteditable attribute. When filtering the input for markup, we had to allow for both sets of elements. In firefox, the elements were all SPANs with style attributes, which isn’t anywhere near semantic.
Firefox LI Bug
Instances of the editor inside of a list item would have a fatal problem with newlines. While you could type alphanumeric characters, newline key presses would have no result. This was a fatal problem that took some time to debug, but it’s been filed and is awaiting resolution.
Obviously, nicedit is a lot less powerful and has a much smaller community. While it works well for quick needs, nicedit just didn’t work for more standard uses, and we found tinymce a much better solution despite it’s bulk. Since then I’ve managed to weed out a lot of tinymce code we weren’t using, optimize it like crazy, and create some custom plugins for it.
Updated: 6/6/09: As of now, I’ve settled on NetBeans as my primary IDE, and Textmate as my secondary. Read below for reasons.
In my line of work, a code editing tool is something that you spend almost all of your day with. There are so many that I keep forgetting what I don’t like about each one, and I return to it six months later thinking it was decent. Here, I’m going to try to outline all of my complaints about each one.
If you’re a developer of any of these, please let me know what I can do to help you fix these problems, or please contact me to explain why I’m failing to see your genius. I’m certain that I’ve been through all of the big ones so if I’m missing one, please let me know.
In general, my must-have features are typically:
I’ve been looking at the Habari Project, a new blogging tool developed specifically for the current state of the web and is supposed to become a WordPress killer. (I’m using wordpress 2.5 for this blog).
The first issue I encountered was the requirement that the mbstring php extension be installed. This extension is not enabled by default, although most web server companies enable it for you in their installation. It was not the greatest experience having to recompile php to enable this, but since it won’t affect most users, I don’t see a large issue with it. However, I’m curious as to how the project will change when PHP6 is released, with improved Unicode support.
The second issue was that the system required me to use an SQLite database during the install which runs on files written by the web server to the file system. I usually don’t like use flat file system for personal reasons. The documentation lists MySQL as an option, but it wasn’t available as a choice during the install.
I’ve also noticed that the software is extremely slow on a CentOS machine. I’ve been using a pentium three with 256mb of ram for application development for months, and no private or public application takes as long as this application to run. Portions of the install process even take up to twenty seconds to load.
By default, the output format of the blog is HTML Transitional. I’ve read in their documentation that it was decision that was debated, but I cannot agree with their reasoning on why they chose HTML versus XHTML, and even beyond that why they would choose Transitional over Strict. My development partners and I are very strong supporters of using xhtml strict in every project and we’ve found that it’s provided the best results in accessibility, user interface development, and integration with server languages.
The user interface is very clean and a welcome relief over the wordpress administration tool. However, I can see the UI becoming cluttered as the application grows and, like WordPress, the navigation may loose it’s current usefulness.
The speed of the application itself ran as expected, and I did not experience any slowness.
Overall I feel that it’s decent blogging application and would be a joy to use for custom development for clients. Unlike WordPress it was developed only for PHP5 and by my quick glances at the templates and the API, I feel like it’s got a better quality and more robust codebase.
