Visual Studio 2008.

Why does it need 205,184k just to open my solution? And why does it need to trash my hard drive?

Vim Macro Recorder.

I love simple tools for simple jobs and the VIM Keyboard Macro recorder is one such tool. In fact it was the reason I found VIM in the first place.

Anyway, how to use the recorder. To record a macro hit the q button and then enter a name for your macro. q is a great name as it is quick to type (qq) but you can name it bob (qbob) or whatever you want. When you finish completing your keyboard maneuvers then hit q again to end the recording.

To play the macro back you type @name. So if you are lazy like me that would be @q. If you want to repeat the macro a number of times then 10@q will play the q macro 10 times.

Konqueror & Dolphin Interesting Poll.

This is a rant about Dolphin and it's development as the default file manager within the KDE4 desktop.

I actually have mixed views on the subject because although I agree with the author of the above that Konqueror is an excellent file manager I can also see the argument for a separate file manager, i.e. Dolphin.

The trouble is that although I like Dolphin I have been having some performance issue's. Now this could be down to the Debian Lenny Backport packages or it could be down to the point that the author of the above has missed. Dolphin is a new application. It has only had 10 months of real world usage and still has a lot of development to go to improve things like stability and performance.

The interesting thing at the end of the above article is that they have a poll of what should be used for web browsing and file management. The outright winner is Firefox for browsing and Konqueror for file management.

Next Version Of IE To Use WebKit..... Maybe?

So the George Bush of the propriety software world, Steve Ballmer, was in Sydney talking to Microsoft developers when one clearly gifted individual stood and asked the following ...

"Why is IE still relevant and why is it worth spending money on rendering engines when there are open source ones available that can respond to changes in Web standards faster?"

Ballmer's reply? "That's cheeky, but a good question, but cheeky".

He then went to to say

"There will still be a lot of proprietary innovation in the browser itself so we may need to have a rendering service," No surprise there then.... but then came...

"Open source is interesting, Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."

So is he saying that Microsoft could one day ship a WebKit based browser? From the earlier comment that would require Microsoft to develop WebKit to work with their extensions and plug ins and would they give them back to the Webkit project. Would the WebKit dev's want the changes to be back ported? Could they even be backported without Microsoft giving away details of the inner's of IE.

Interesting questions which will probably never have to be answered.

KDE 4.1.3 "Change" Is Out

The KDE project has announced that KDE 4.1.3 (codenamed "Change") is now available.

4.1.3 is the 3rd maintenance release for 4.1 with the main updates being :

• Two crashes fixed in the Dolphin filemanager
• A large number of bugfixes and optimizations in the KHTML HTML rendering component.
• Several bugfixes in the Kopete multi-protocol Instant Messenger.

The rest of the changelog can be found here.

QT Creator - First Impressions.

I will be honest, I am maxed out completely at the moment and haven't had much of a chance to look at the new IDE from QT Software. I have however, been reading some interesting posts from around the KDE community which seem to be split as to whether or not the application is a good move and welcome.

The KDevelop team seem to think it is a duplication of effort and I can see why. However, as someone that spends much of his days battling, erm I mean enjoying(!) Visual Studio it always suprised me that QT did not have a good IDE of it's own. I have loaded monkey studio and tried to build something with code blocks. They are both ok IDE's but VS does provide a benchmark for IDE functionality. i would say that VS goes so far as to make certain tasks very easy and some programmers very lazy. I don't think that this is a good thing but that is my opinion.

I have used KDevelop in the past but have not always found it's UI to be particularly easy to work with. Of late I have started to head down the same route as Aaron and Ivan, basically Vim is my friend. Both of those previous links are to posts relating to QT Creator and KDevelop. Aarons makes for very interesting reading while Ivan basically agrees.

As for me well I installed the windows binary of QT Creator this morning while waiting for a build, fired it up and got a memory error. Tried again and it fired up. First impresssion is that it looks professional. Once I have tried to use it I will report my honest opinion.

QT Creator - Technology Preview Available.

The project that has been rumored around the web over the last couple of months is now finally available as a technology preview.

QT Creator (know previously as Greenhouse) is a cross platform IDE that aims to provide a single development environment for QT. With code editor and designer for the UI elements and integrated debugger.

You can grab downloads here for linux, mac and windows.