Jake Herringbone

IntelliJ IDEA, week 1

I switched from eclipse to IDEA about a week ago, mostly due to prompting from jkuhnert. I feel like making a Borat reference: “Verry niiiice.”

If I start getting preachy about IDEA, I’ll have to back it up with real reasons why it is good, so here are my favorites. Mind you, I’m just learning things as I stumble upon them, and I’m no expert yet – but maybe these are some things you can look forward to in that crucial week 1… that time when you throw away most new tools you try.

First, the obvious things – it’s streamlined for common developer tasks, doesn’t try to compile your whole project all the time, and comes with most of the stuff you need, instead of giving you the pleasure of choosing the right plugins.

Keyboard shortcuts. I’ve had “learn more keyboard shortcuts” on my list for a while, because when it comes to raw productivity, you want to be able to do things in the computer at a similar speed to what happens in your brain. The mouse is fine up to a certain speed, but it hits a wall. Learning keyboard shortcuts, on the other hand, is an investment like making yourself touch-type, you can keep getting faster. IDEA really makes it possible to do away with the mouse. And, they are great about putting keymap hints on the UI, as well as providing a nice cheatsheet

The changelist feature. We are always somewhere between an svn update and an svn commit, and every change we make ends up in a list when commit time rolls around. Most of the time, I don’t have a nice clean changeset to commit, because I’ve made some other changes that belong with each other, or I don’t want to promote to version control. IDEA shows you that list of changes all the time, instead of at commit time, and lets you push those changes into different changelists as you go. It’s really consistent, too, with the diff viewer open you can flip back and forth through your changes and move them to changelists there too. Howard Lewis Ship blogged about this one. Although duck_typer has a good point – you can just have multiple working copies of the project, and use one for each set of changes. That way if you touch the same file in two changesets, you’re still ok.

The UI Layout. I actually have problems reading the text in eclipse, which makes me feel old. You can force some text size changes, but things like the navigator panel and tab titles were always annoying. For some reason, the swing UI in IDEA has nicer fonts, a more comfortable layout, and seems more responsive. (yeah, most things are more responsive than eclipse)

Anyway, those probably won’t be my favorite features in a few months, but they’re making me happy for now.

Android!

For those who don’t know (somehow), Google has acquired and released their platform for “iPhone killer” phones. It’s called android. Seems like this is a good chance to practice building phone apps, especially since it doesn’t involve learning Objective C.

I think it could be a fun way to spend the day-after-Thanksgiving. Also, please enjoy my requisite self-referential pic of the new phone, like I did for the iPhone.