Julien Lecomte’s Blog

TextMate has gained a lot of traction in the past few years, especially among web developers. Ruby developers swear by it for some reason. I don’t have MacOS X at home so I don’t use TextMate. Instead, my favorite text editor is gedit, the official text editor of the GNOME desktop environment. Unlike TextMate, gedit does not cost a thing, and is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is extremely light weight and easily extensible via plugins, which can be written either in C or Python. On Ubuntu, the most popular plugins can be installed via the package gedit-plugins. Additional third party plugins can be downloaded here. Some of my favorite plugins include the following:

• File browser pane
• Find in documents
• Draw spaces
• Reopen tabs
• Save without trailing space
• Symbol browser
• Tab converter

I also use the Darkmate theme for syntax highlighting. Finally, TextMate aficionados will enjoy this article explaining how to configure gedit to look and behave just like their editor of choice. Now, if you really insist on spending $64 (that’s how much a single user license for TextMate costs as the time of this writing), I would recommend you donate this amount to a charity of your choice. They really need it. Cheers!

Last night, I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Release Candidate on my laptop (a HP dv2000 with a dual core AMD64 2.8GHz CPU and 2GB RAM) I had used Ubuntu in the past (versions 7.04 and 7.10) on that same machine, but finally turned to Windows Vista because my hardware was not very well supported on Linux (mainly my Broadcom wireless card) However, last night, I fell in love with Ubuntu all over again. The install went very smoothly, and everything worked right out of the box. I activated the proprietary drivers for both my video card and my wireless card, and voila! I was off and running in about 30 minutes. Awesome!

Douglas Crockford just published his first book titled JavaScript: The Good Parts. After reading this book, some of you may be left with the impression that Douglas is always complaining about some aspect of this very popular programming language. However, having been a user of the JavaScript language for about 7 years, and having used it extensively in small web sites and large web applications, all I can tell you is that I could not agree more with the author.

It is really unfortunate that we live in an imperfect world. As such, there is no perfect programming language, and there will probably never be. However, by gaining a deep understanding of the philosophy and the inner workings of a programming language, and by sticking to a subset of that language (what the author refers to as the “good parts”), we can all become better programmers by constructing more reliable and more maintainable programs.

In JavaScript: The Good Parts, Douglas extensively describes that good subset of the JavaScript language, occasionally warning to avoid the bad. I consider Douglas’ book a must-buy for anybody who’s serious about developing professional applications for the web. It’s definitely well worth the read!

This new version of the compressor fixes a few bugs and implements a few additional micro optimizations. Please refer to the CHANGELOG file for a complete list of changes, and don’t hesitate to report any issue you may experience with this version of the YUI Compressor.

Download version 2.3 of the YUI Compressor

I wish all of you a happy new year from beautiful Rio de Janeiro! I’m still enjoying a hot (95F) and humid weather before heading back to the US in a few days. May 2008 bring you happiness and success in all of your endeavors. Cheers!

I have been using Gmail every since it first went public. I’ve always liked it for its simplicity, reliability and performance. When I read that the Gmail team had done some work to make their product even faster, I could not wait to get my hands on the new version. This morning, I was finally able to try it out and I was extremely disappointed. Firefox kept crashing, locking up, and the overall performance went down dramatically (in spite of disabling Firebug and turning the chat feature off.) I have read many such reports on other blogs, so I am wondering what the QA procedure is at Google. Maybe it’s time to put the “beta” back in Gmail, or roll back the previous version…

In the meantime, I’ll switch back to the good old Yahoo! Mail.

Update: Gmail is still in beta. For some reason, I thought they had passed that stage. My apologies for the misinformation.

Update: The Gmail developers kept a link to the older version (look at the links located at the top right of the page) Very wise decision indeed.

Yahoo! launched a new version of its search engine today. Until now, I was a Google user simply because Google’s results were a little bit more relevant, and also because it seemed a bit faster. However, the new Yahoo! Search has won me over. Here’s why:

First of all, the Yahoo! search page has been simplified to the extreme, which makes it load extremely fast. Second, the search page now has an auto-complete feature, similar to Google suggest. I had been waiting for this feature for a long time! Finally, Yahoo! has made huge improvements to the search results page, embedding rich media within search results, and adding an assistant to help you refine your search, and even explore related areas that you may not even have been aware existed! This is simply brilliant! Not only searching with Yahoo! quickly and efficiently leads you to what you were looking for, but it has also become a fun learning experience! Give it a try, and like me, you’ll quickly adopt it!

Below is a screenshot of a search for Nelly Furtado:

I am currently attending the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago, IL. Yesterday’s keynote was a great showcase of what Adobe’s latest technologies are about to bring to the web and to the desktop. Here are a few pictures of the keynote (hover over the images to get a short description)

I have been involved with web development since 2001, and Ajax since 2003 (before it was even coined “Ajax”) I have looked at Adobe’s technologies for a while, and have finally come around. I have to admit that Flash Player 9, ActionScript 3, Flex 2 (Flex 3 coming very soon) and Flex Builder 2 (soon Flex Builder 3) make for a very solid development platform to create rich Internet applications. Add AIR (Adobe’s Integrated Runtime) to the mix and you have a great platform to develop cross-platform, web-enabled applications.

My only problem with Adobe’s technologies is that they are proprietary technologies. However, this only outlines the failure of the W3C and other standards bodies to push the web forward. And with an incredible 90% market penetration (according to Adobe), isn’t Flash a De Facto standard anyway?

Update: After attending the day 2 keynote, I keep thinking that while so many web developers are still trying to figure out how to make rounded corners work on all browsers, Adobe is really pushing the envelope with truly ground-breaking technologies. What a contrast!