I’m not overly fond of Appcelerator Studio. Using it on my old Fujitsu i5 Windows 10 laptop, it’s slow, it’s 32-bit (an unfair peeve, I know), it requires an Internet connection, and it crashes a lot. However, it is an IDE, it does offer me a console view, and most importantly, gives me a one click compile and run option for both Android and iOS app development – so for now I’ll stick with it.
A bug that has cropped up more than once for me is when all of a sudden I can’t login in to the IDE any more. Essentially the program keeps prompting me to login via a modal dialog box, disregarding both correct and incorrect login details. The only way to kill the app is then via the Task Manager, which as you can imagine, raises one’s blood pressure far above where it should normally be!
As it turns out, one of the profile security related files seems to corrupt every now and then, meaning that in order to fix this particular problem, you need to simply hunt down a file called secure_storage sitting under your profile’s org.eclipse.equinox.security entry and DELETE it.
On my Windows 10 install, this file can be found here:
NOTE: Of course, before just deleting this file, you should probably try to see what is happening during the login process. To do this, fire up a command prompt and run
appc login -l trace
This should give you some better feedback as to what is going wrong in the first place. Like say, perhaps your subscription having expired etc.
The Alt+Shift+F or Source->Format option is one of my favourite functions in the NetBeans IDE, because it immediately makes my tangled spaghetti page of variables and logic look like a beautifully crafted and carefully laid out piece of code.
Prior to NetBeans 7.2 the Format option would only be available if you had focus on a code editor window and thus would be applied to that particular file that you were currently bashing away at. However, NetBeans 7.2 brought with it an awesome little tweak: you can now mass source format multiple files simply by selecting a file group or folder in the Projects node, Source Packages node, or Folders node window.
Having selected your targeted group and then hitting the Source->Format menu option, all files will be formatted using the source format rules currently set up under Options.
Geany is a text editor using the GTK2 toolkit with basic features of an integrated development environment (IDE). It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports a fair number of languages (like PHP for example) and has most of the features that you would require from a simple IDE, making it a worthy tool for me to use on my sluggish home desktop PC, in place of the a bit too resource heavy, JAVA-powered NetBeans IDE.
Anyway, the default is for Geany to have a bright white background with a dark foreground, but if you’ve been in the programming game for as long as what I have, then you’ll undoubtedly know that working on a dark background with a light foreground is far superior when it comes to wanting to try and reduce eye-strain brought on by long bouts in front of the screen!
Unfortunately it isn’t immediately apparent how to set a dark background color in Geany, but thankfully the option is there if you just search a little harder:
(From the main menu) Edit -> Preferences -> Editor. Once on the Editor options level, select the Display tab to the far right of the dialog, and you will notice a checkbox marked “Invert syntax highlighting colors”.
Check this and you’ll return to a beautifully black background with a light foreground.
I quite enjoy using the free to use NetBeans as my PHP editor/IDE of choice, more info on which can be found at the offical website: http://netbeans.org/. This is a quick step through of how to install the latest stable version of NetBeans, i.e. 7.0.1, into your Ubuntu desktop.
Disappointingly, NetBeans isn’t included in the new fancy Ubuntu Software Center, so let’s just grab it as if we were using any old Linux installation. First, browse to the official NetBeans download page at http://netbeans.org/downloads/index.html
Select the IDE language and Platform you need NetBeans for (in this case obviously we need the Linux (x86/x64) version), and then select the initial supported technologies version you require from the download table. In my case I only need the PHP version, so I click on the 41 MB download under the PHP column.
Once the download of the .sh file is complete, open up a terminal and browse to your Downloads folder (In my case, the download was saved as netbeans-7.0.1-ml-php-linux.sh). Now to launch the install process:
sudo bash netbeans-7.0.1-ml-php-linux.sh
After entering in your administrative password, the NetBeans installer dialog will launch. Follow the prompts as you normally would for any other installer, and voilà, you’ll now find the NetBeans 7.0.1 launcher sitting under the Programming menu in the main Applications menu – if you aren’t using the new Unity menu system of course. If you are, then simply search for NetBeans and you’ll be good to go! ;)
I enjoy using the powerful NetBeans IDE for all my PHP web development work, and believe it or not, installing it in Ubuntu is actually pretty simple to achieve.
First, download the necessary .sh install file from http://netbeans.org/downloads/. Ensure the platform is set to Linux (x86/x64) and click on the link of the associated PHP installer download (31 MB).
Once the download has completed, run the following command to initiate the install:
Follow the onscreen instructions and Bob’s you uncle. That easy to get a fantastic PHP IDE setup on your Ubuntu machine in just about no time at all! :)
Note: You’ll find the program shortcut under the Programming menu entry under your main system’s Applications menu.
