Most web and application developers that I know are using proficient in many text editors. The editor that they are using is either a result of the product that they are working on, or past experience using a particular piece of technology (extension, script, plugin, etc) that makes the daily grind a little better. I rarely find a developer who doesn’t have a problem with some facet of the text editor that they are using, and many of which feel that they are stuck for one reason or another with a particular editor because of the feature set it offers.

One thing that seems to be a common theme among these editors is that they sit somewhere between a simple text editor, providing only basic functionality of text formatting, and a full-blown suite of tools which is offered by enterprise packages such as Microsoft’s Visual Studio which costs thousands of dollars and only works on the Windows platform. Each has its specific use case, and I would never suggest creating a Visual Studio project file to edit a README file using the Markdown syntax, but every time that I have the opportunity to use Visual Studio I always walk away feeling let down the next time I drop into Emacs.

A key feature that I think is necessary in a development environment is the ability for the software package to support live documentation. This means that I want to be able pull up a quick blurb about a particular API call that I am about to make, either be it in a standard library that ships with the language of my choice, or the application project that I am working on. The discoverability of documentation needs to be in depth, but not something which clutters my code window.

The editor software needs to be able to be extended on a per project basis. There are often cases where a particular set of tools is necessary for one web project, let’s say something like CodeIgniter which uses the Sparks package management system, and another application that is written with Ruby on Rails and using the RubyGems system for extensions. And it is not merely easy just to say that all PHP applications will use the mode for PHP, and all the Rails projects will use the mode for Ruby, because often there is a frontend component which shares context between the two and is written in a language such as JavaScript (or more recently, Clojure).

Testing each project now becomes an absolute pain in the ass. I may need to manage the version of Ruby that I am running, or perhaps bounce the Apache instances so that my new configuration is picked up, or even worse the web application needs to be executed from a browser, I need to tail a log file, and pray that the browser debugging software is updated. That’s way too many context switches.

I believe that there can be a much better way of handling the day to day workflow of software development. There is a simple solution to this problem that seems to have been overlooked with fancy editors designed to be visually pleasing on the Mac. What do you think your ideal development environment would be? All developers hate writing documentation, but it is the first that we reach for when we want to understand how to work with a library or call a standard API. We cry out aloud when our text editor doesn’t index the code that I am writing and provide autocomplete. And we bitch when extending the editor becomes a chore which sometimes rivals the problems we’re trying to solve.

There is a better way to handle this.

The first few days that  I was trying to play the game Mozilla’s servers must have been swamped. I was unable to actually get beyond the initial screen, but thankfully Mozilla posted the source code for both the client and server, completely written in Javascript and available on Github, so I was able to satisfy my technology curiosities. The past few years with the introduction of more powerful, freely available, open source Javascript engines such as Mozilla’s own SpiderMonkey and Google’s V8, have paved the way for a language which is interoperable with C/C++ to be easily embeddable and integrated with existing application systems. Node.js was made available to quickly build scalable event-driven servers that can power whole service-oriented backends, and this is precisely the same technology used in BrowserQuest.

This brings me back to my roots. When I was younger what brought me into the realm of programming was both web development, and text-based roleplaying games. Along with a few friends I ran what is commonly referred to as a MUD, or Multi-User Dungeon, a small application which ran on a remote machine allowing players to connect over the Internet. This game was completely driven by text; movement, combat, and storytelling were all expressed with text, sometimes an emphasis using bold and italic font styles, by the time that I got to the game coloring was available as well, but the game itself was completely driven by imagination.

I can see myself getting back involved in a community developing a game that is available for players to connect to, quest with their friends, and being there to generally provide an escape, an alternative, to the high-priced, resource demanding, massive multiplayer games that exist such as Star Wars and World of Warcraft. I can’t wait to see what the development community comes up with, and I hope that I find the time to participate in what I believe to be the reemerging platform that will hopefully spark a new generation of programmers willing to tinker, hack, and make some awesome art.

I do not plan to make a frequent habit of this, but I had to try out the WordPress application for Android. The last time I remember using the mobile version was posting via an email sent to a special address that was set up for the blog. That particular medium for blogging wasn’t half bad, but I found that formatting was less than stellar.

You can often tell that I do not go back and edit ny posts unless there is some kind of obvious oversight. Previously, I had cats like Daniel Boston and Kenny Katzgrau for that jazz, it wasn’t my job in those days, and I don’t really care for it now. Kudos to those two for taking my midnight ramblings and making them legible for newspaper print.

Lately I have been trying to get back to my roots as a writer, and entrepreneur, because I feel connected much more to those industries than where I see myself now. Ideally they would both intersect, with some code and software involved, but sometimes that’s not what is in the cards for you.

I would love to be able to provide wisdom to today’s youth with the coined phrase of “take the road less travelled,” but I prefer to tell them to make money, get drunk, and party like a fucking rockstar. If anyone complains, screw them, you only live once, and be sure to write their asses off when you make your fortune.

Just remember that your fortune and legacy doesn’t always need to be valued by your monetary worth.

Sent from my Android.

Earlier in the year I installed a developer preview of Lion which did not seem to include too many features. In fact, I did not even remember that I installed this, and when it came to the Mac App Store at first it believed that I already had Lion installed. After some searching through Google and forum posts I was able to figure out how to reset the Mac App Store and get Lion downloaded. The installer kicked off without any problems. This is when the proverbial shit hit the fan.

I was greeted with a failure message that basically told me jack squat. My disk was corrupt and unable to be repaired by the Lion installation image (or the bundled Disk Utility program). This was a real problem. After some quick searching some fellow patrons suggested trying a repair installation with the original Snow Leopard installation disk. I tried this and was met with a little success – I was now greeted with a seemingly updated installer that included Safari and an updated version of Disk Utility. But to no avail was I able to actually get Lion installed on the disk. My laptop was effectively a brick.

Since I was actually busy this weekend (riding the Monster around New Jersey) I decided that I would make an appointment to see the “Genius” bar at the heralded 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York City. This was a big mistake. Despite making the appointment an hour and a half ahead, arriving fifteen minutes before my appointment, it took them a full hour to actually see me. Not the best service thus far. The “Genius” that I met with was baffled at the problem claiming to never have seen the installation do this to a laptop. Great.

What really complicated the matter was that I was using FileVault to encrypt my home directory just in case my laptop got stolen. If it wasn’t for this fact I would have merely copied all of my music, photos, and documents over from the directory to an intermediate storage device. After completing the re-installation of Lion I could copy it over and all is good. But, rightfully so, this was not the way to actually complete the measure.

Now I am writing this without actually attempting to open up the encrypted sparsebundle that my data is stored in. I have a copy on an external drive that I mounted in the Lion installer, and copied over the files from the Terminal application. The actual Lion installation (after using Disk Utility to erase my main disk) went smoothly without a hitch. All of my applications were installed and ready to go after about an hour and a half.

The only thing that remains right now is getting the sparsebundle mounted unencrypted so I can extract the data, and figuring out why my instructions for using a third party device to backup with Time Machine don’t work. It is looking like that Apple is requiring the use of AFP protocol for Time Machine backups. This won’t be too much of a problem as the open source netatalk solves this for all of you Linux users, but for people using an integrated device that runs a stripped down version of Linux it may be a little bit of a pain to get this on the device. Nevertheless, I am on the problem.

Type Aloud has been a dream of mine for at least four years now. I envisioned a writing and reading community where people will not only be able to share their stories (and poems) but also get collaborative feedback for both editing, and hopefully, print publishing. Some of the most intriguing writing I have read came from people that were not published professionally. I look forward to being able to read (and write!) much more than I have in the past with this service. My primary goal is not to be profitable: Type Aloud is a service that I want to use myself. I am a lucky man if I am able to break even.

For those of you that consider yourselves an amateur writer, or anyone who has the itch to tell a good story, please head on over to Type Aloud where you can sign up and begin writing! Over the next couple of weeks I am going to start posting some of my own work, and I will be (trying) to get some local writers to do the same. The more, the merrier.

Now its time for me to go to bed.