Eclipse PDT : PHP Editor

PDT is a PHP editing IDE for Eclipse.  It provides all those lovely debugging, outlining, code hinting tools that  Eclipse provides for PHP development.  I hadn't written about it earlier as I hadn't had time to get going with it until yesterday.  My colleague installed it pretty well straight away and has been using (and  raving about ) it since.  I have been looking across with envy and saying I must find time to get that installed. 

To be fair I had tried to install it after the 1.0 release.  But it can be a bit awkward to install as it has a swarm of dependancies.  Fortunately, there is now an all in one release, but it means re-installing Eclipse and for Flex developers then re-installing Flex Builder (this question of dependencies and how they are managed is Eclipses Achilles heal).  It is worth the effort as PDT is already a great PHP development environment.

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Flash Player : April Security Update

Adobe have released an advanced warning regarding the 9th April release of a Flash Player Security Update.  The update is comprehensive and has the potential to break many existing projects.  I would recommend that anyone who has developed a Flash application that loads data through any mechanism take a close look at the update and consider any necessary action.

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Google Sites : Get Your (Google) Stuff Together

For a long time it's been clear to me that Web 2.0 must eventually resolve itself into a small number of all in one place tools.  For the last few years many of us have been choosing publishing platforms for our image, video, blogging, bookmarks, calendars, documents ...  But that place hasn't always been the same place.  For example, this blog is published using Google Blogger and I regularly include photos stored in Yahoos Flickr (I could use Picasa but I prefer Flickr).  I have sidebar widgets that aggregate my bookmarks from Faves and my shared items from Google Reader.  But I have other content in other places that can't be easily added to my blog and the blog isn't the ideal place for all my content.  What we need is one flexible tool that brings them all together.  The recently released Google Sites seems to me to be a prototype for the uber-tool of the future.  Google Sites is built on tools Google acquired from the Jotspot wiki company.  It allows you to bring together content from a wide range of (Google) sources; calendar, docs, spreadsheets. 

At this stage I'm just noting my thoughts on Google Sites. I haven't had time to get under the hood and have a play.  I certainly have some concerns about how nicely it plays with other systems.  I'd hate to think a time is coming when we need to make a choice between one of two or three uber systems for all our bits.  But it seems we are one step closer to being able to display all our public bits in one place and that a good thing.

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My First Game : Wheel Of Death

Feeling pretty excited I uploaded my first game; Wheel of Death onto Kongregate a couple of hours ago.  If you aren't familiar with Kongregate it's the king (King Kong : apologies for that) of the new wave of web 2.0 social gaming sites.  If you like playing trivial and annoying Flash games (like the one I just added) it's a great place to go.  The game was built using the 2D Physics Engine Box2DFlashAS3.  This was my preferred engine when I did a review of the available engines back in January.  I haven't written much about Flash 2D Physics since them mostly because I've been spending most of my spare time building this game.  I think it's still a bit buggy.  But for a first game I'm pretty happy.  I've got a few pressing work committments.  But hopefully I'll have time to get a few more of the bugs out and blog about the experience of building it with Box2DFlashAS3 in the near future.

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Wozniak criticises smartphones

"I'm learning to use their menus, it's awkward. I feel like a slave and less important than the technology."

The above quote is from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and was made at this weeks Broadband and Beyond conference in Sydney. He also had some mixed comments toward the iPhone. But the above quote really struck a note for me. Considering how long we've been designing and using screen based GUI's I don't understand why even the most basic tasks on the latests phones are so hard to do. I regularly find myself cursing because it takes five selections to delete messages or four to make a phone call. Surely common tasks (like making a call) should be easier. The other thing this comment highlighted for me is that technology works when it puts people first. Technology should always aim towards the highest achievable level of transperancy.

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