Monday, August 03, 2009

Twitter, Pydev homepage & Usability improvements

I've recently started to Tweet to reporting on what's happening in Pydev (http://twitter.com/fabiofz), so, it might be worth for those that want to get on the bits & pieces around the unreleased version.

Now, on with what's happening in the Pydev world: the Pydev and the Pydev Extensions homepages were updated -- yes, they were outdated in a number of things -- Pydev is evolving too fast for them to keep up :)

It was pretty nice that while going over the editors/details to explain them on the homepage, I ended up reorganizing things and improving the usability as a direct result of that (I think it's much easier/better to code and give a better interface than to explain why something doesn't actually work some way in minor details).

So, hopefully those usability improvements will make the lives easier for people using Pydev (and for those starting up too).

I've already published the homepage with screeshots of those improvements, but right now, they're only available in the nightly build (and will be released at 1.4.8)

Some of those usability improvements are:
  • Preview of the color options chosen
  • Preview of the code formatting chosen
  • Preview of changing the code style
  • Preview of block comments
  • Auto imports properly working when the editor changes (ctrl+shift+O in Pydev Extensions)
  • Hover works on markers when the editor changes
  • A Pydev (Jython) project can coexist with a JDT project (and properly use its info -- only project references worked previously)
  • Improved error messages for Iron Python not being version 2.6
  • The interactive console no longer halts the UI thread
... and some others I don't remember anymore ...

Some rough edges are probably still lurking around, but hopefully it has become harder to spot those :)

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi , maybe you can post a tutorial using pydev with cocos2d. Thanks.

Joseph Coffey said...

I just wanted to say thanks for the non blocking console. For scientific use these makes all the difference in the world.