For those of you who can’t wait for 1.2 to start writing with the landscape keyboard (believe me, I feel your pain), if you have $4 to spare, you don’t have to. iNote was just released today, a simple notes application that operates in landscape mode, and also includes the ability to group notes into categories. One thing that it lacks, as some people have noted in the ratings section on the App Store, is the ability to sync notes to your desktop or notebook. This might render the application useless, except for one thing: you can send your notes via email. While this obviously isn’t a satisfactory solution for many people, for some writers, including myself, who need a tool to write on-the-go, and a way to get first drafts onto their main machine, this will do for now, especially since it’s only $4, and it’s currently the only working writing application on the iPhone with the wider keyboard.

iNote works well enough. It’s a little buggy when pulling up the keyboard. Sometimes the keyboard covers the typing area, but after playing with it just a bit, I found that this is caused by certain actions, and there are easy ways to prevent it. I’m my opinion, it’s definitely worth the $4.

There was also one feature that I knew was going to be a disappontment before I bought this thing, and that was the fact that the landscape keyboard didn’t work in any other application besides Safari. This meant that I couldn’t do any writing unless I was connected to the internet. While this was an important feature to be missing in my view, I went ahead with the purchase because it wasn’t the main reason why I was buying the iPod (hello, music?), and also because I took a guess, knowing that this feature was being demanded by Apple’s consumer fan base, that it would soon be made possible. I also knew that the App Store was coming, which meant that if Apple didn’t make it happen, someone else would.

So for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been waiting anxiously for July 11, the debut of the App Store (I know it opened a day early). When the store opened, I spent quite a while browsing through all 500+ apps, like every other Apple fan boy that day, looking to see what amazing new things I could make my iPod do. I found some super cool games, a couple of handy utilities, and even some neat apps that my 18-month-old son could play with. It was a fun experience.

But by the end of the day, I had been through the whole catalog, and had yet to find any applications that used the landscape keyboard at all, much less any offline writing application that would operate in landscape mode. And in that regard, I was dreadfully dissappointed.

But then, late at night, just before I was about to close my eyes, I was laying in bed browsing the app store on my iPod, and I ran accross an app I had previously overlooked, called Zenbe Lists, a list-making app that let’s you write long-format notes in each list item. I downloaded and installed the app, and lo-and-behold, it worked in landscape mode, with a keyboard, and saved the lists locally, no Internet connection required.

There are a couple more amazing things about this app:

• It syncs your lists to an online database whenever you wish, just push the sync button
• It’s free

What is this? The only app among the 500+ apps in the brand new App Store that offers an offline landscape keyboard, is free? Unbelievable.

Zenbe works well and is stable from what I’ve seen so far. The syncing could use some work. When syncing a short list, it worked fine, but then I tried syncing a list with a long note, and it ended up duplicating that list item, so that it appeared twice in the list. It also cuts the bottom half off the bottom line where the keyboard slightly overlaps the text field you type into, which wouldn’t be a super big deal, except that the bottom line is almost always the one you’re typing on, which means that it’s a bit difficult to see what you’re typing. It’s not a deal breaker for me; I’m sure they’ll fix it, my eyes are usually on the keyboard when I’m using a thumb board anyway, and hey, when all is said and done, it’s free, right?

Bottom line, it’s a good start to solving a big problem. Zenbe is a great application for writing on the iPod Touch or iPhone. Highly recommended.

Out of sheer curiosity, I checked again today. Lo and behold, the Windows version is finally available. It’s in beta, and I haven’t tested it thoroughly yet. But hey, it’s free and awesome, so the mere fact that it’s available is pretty exciting.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re an amateur or a professional. If you have enough fonts to merit a management application, FontExplorer X is both simple and versatile, and by far the best free font management application ever.

I’ve enjoyed the writings and podcasts of Merlin Mann for some time now, and his affinity for obscure bands has lead me to more than one great sound. Consequently, I’ve been a bit more interested in discovering new sounds on my own.

I discovered My Imaginary Life on VIRB. The sole force behind this great music is Jessica Emelia. She only has one album, which she created for the 2007 RPM Challenge.

Jessica does a great job of selecting the elements of the song that she wants to stand out, building those elements elaborately, and leaving the rest of the orchestration as a simple, consistent, undergirding foundation. Jessica’s strengths are her lyrics, her voice, and her intelligent selection and orchestration of simple instrumental progressions. She doesn’t try to be a full band, and her music would lose it’s magic if she did.

The lyrics are refreshingly genuine. You feel like you’re right there in the cryptic stories that are woven, the imaginary life, if you will.

Train is a strong piece that exemplifies this lyric style. Have you ever sat on a bus, a train, or in the passenger seat of a car, looking out the window, watching the trees, cars, fences, houses, and scenery rush by, and you begin to sink into this hypnotic state of thought, that’s almost like a deep, poignant conversation with yourself, so vivid that you can practically hear your own voice in your head?

Yeah, it’s like that.

My Imaginary Life has some unusual but effective instrument, effects, and vocal choices throughout pretty much every song, each unique in it’s own rite. The toy piano sounds and whispey vocals in Goodbye are beautiful and mysterious. Desert, with it’s dirty guitar distortion and hallway vocal reverberation, has a wonderful nostalgic quality to it, and the vocal tones are very expressive. Jukebox Melody has fast, gutsy lyrics; hard to pull off, and done very well.

This small-budget album reminds me of the beginnings of Beck. With an unusual approach to basic, low-cost tools, together with unique words and vocal melody, My Imaginary Life reminds us that you don’t have to spend a fortune, or be backed by a fortune, to produce great music.

iLike is one of the funnest applications I?ve downloaded in a while. Check it out. It?s available for Windows and Mac.

Mystickies.com is going to revolutionize the way that the WWW is organized on your machine. The basic idea is, you sign up, install their extension (they’ve got one for Firefox, and one for Safari and IE on the way), then go surfing. When you run across something that you want to bookmark, or something about a site that you want to remember, you just hold down the Alt key and drag a box, right there, anywhere on the web page. This creates a sticky note on that site. Make some notations about the site for yourself. Then add some tags to the note so that it’s searchable later. Then surf on. Don’t worry about that page anymore; close it and go. That’s it.

A week or so later, when you come back to that page, guess what? You’re sticky will still be there, in all its glorious stickiness! Oh, joy! You can also go the Mystickies.com website and log into your account. The Stickies tab on your control panel will show you a list of your stickies from all across the web, that you can sort and search through by the content of the stickies or the tags you created Update: it looks like I was mistaken here; they don’t have a search form in the contol panel yet, so you can only search by tags. You can view the stickies right on Mystickies.com, or go to the website that the sticky is stuck to. What a wonderful, gooey idea! Kind of tacky, but easy to bond with! I’m really attached to it! My hair’s getting all matted! Woohoo! Okay, this is getting weird…

The stickies apparently have a special type of adhesive that allow them to stick to any type of website; plastic, grinded steel, brickwork, even water, air, and/or fire, you name it, the notes will hang it. The developers have refused to comment on their secret ingredients.

If you don’t use Firefox, you can still use Mystickies.com. They have a bookmarklet that should work with any popular browser, which makes the whole, gummy experience almost as fun.

Anyhow, very cool. Very useful. Check it out and join me in my new initiative: Litter the World Wide Web. (I don’t know, maybe it’s already dirty enough…)

Link: Mystickies.com

For a little over a year now, I’ve been using the Eclipse IDE for developing websites and online apps in PHP, XHTML, CSS, and Javascript. Eclipse is a very versatile, stable, and professional development platform, especially for those who hand code, though it has plenty to offer for WYSIWYG developers. Eclipse was originally designed, as I understand it, as a platform for Java development, testing, and packaging. It was developed by IBM and later released into Open Source. The Eclipse Foundation was formed in 2001 by several leaders of the software development industry, and became a non-profit organization in 2004. Eclipse has now evolved into an extremely open platform for development in almost any programming or scripting language in existence. (More history here.)

Eclipse has what I consider the best solutions for every one of my needs. Granted, I haven’t thoroughly tested every development application for every discipline I work in. I’m sure there are a lot of apps I didn’t try for developing CSS or Javascript. For PHP, however, I’ve ran the gauntlet. I tried Maguma, Komodo, Zend, NuSphere… you name it. If I didn’t try it, then the company doesn’t know how to optimize their site for Google. I looked pretty hard for XHTML development apps, too. The point here, though, is that Eclipse is the best IDE. That’s spelled Integrated Development Environment. I can do everything development-centric in one application, and Eclipse throws in a bunch of extras to top it all off.

Eclipse doesn’t do everything I need right out of the box, but there are all kinds of really great plugins, and all free for non-commercial users, and really cheap otherwise. The plugins are also really easy to download and install. Most of the time you don’t even have to leave the application; Eclipse finds the plugins itself and installs them automagically. All it needs is a URL, and a lot of times it already knows it.

PHPEclipse

PHPEclipse, as the name implies, is the plugin that facilitates PHP development. I’ve read that Zend is developing a PHP development solution for Eclipse, too. If it’s anything like their Studio, I’ve already made up my mind; and even if it’s not, it’s hard to see how they’re going to beat all the awesomeness that PHPEclipse provides.

Color Coding & Folding

Color coding and code folding are the basic starters; it folds classes, methods, function, and multi-line comments. I rarely use folding, but I do sometimes, and it’s nice to know it’s their. Heck, when first started out, I spent days looking for a solution that would fold code; it was my first and most important criteria. Then, when I finally found a solution that did code folding, and including all my other “lesser” needs, I never even used the folding. Just like a white boy…

Outline Panel

But I digress. Moving on to the more powerful features, PHPEclipse comes with an outline panel, which is extremely handy for navigating quickly around long classes and large documents full of methods. The outline panel lists all classes in a document, and includes their properties and methods, and it also lists floating functions. It allows you to sort the list alphabetically, which is really great because it makes items really easy to find in a long document.

Code Completion

PHPEclipse also sports comprehensive code completion. Again, this is a feature that I rarely use, and I’ve never been crazy about code completion in any development package. But a lot of people like it, and you can turn it off in the preferences if you don’t.

Function Definitions

This is the greatest time saving feature ever. How many times do you have to go to PHP’s site just because you can’t remember the required parameters, or their order, for a particular PHP function? For me, it’s all the time; or rather it used to be. PHPEclipse takes care of that with floating function definitions. If you float your mouse over a PHP function, a box will popup with a brief description of the function, and an explanation of its syntax, i.e. the parameters it requires and their order. This means that I rarely have to go to the PHP documentation anymore to remember what parameters I need to give a certain function; the information is right there at any given moment, whenever and wherever I need it. I barely have to move a muscle (now that’s my kind of technology).

What’s even cooler, the definitions are not limited to PHP’s predefined functions; they also include any custom function or method that you have created in your entire project, even if it’s in a different file. Say, for example, that I typed the following in one file in a project:

class ExampleClass {
    public function exampleFunction($param1,$param2,$param3) {
        //code here...
    }
}

Then I saved the file and closed it. Then I create a new document in the same project, maybe in the same folder, maybe in a different folder, and in that document I type:

$test = new ExampleClass;
$x = $test->exampleFunction();

…but I don’t type in the parameters for the method, because I can’t remember them. I could go find the file where the method was created, but with PHPEclipse I don’t have to. I just float my mouse over “$test->exampleFunction“, and a box pops up that tells me several things about that function, including the parameters that it needs and their order. Very clear, very easy to understand; a real time-saving feature.

Variable Instance Highlighting

Yet another really useful feature. If you have your cursor on a variable called $example, then all of the other places where $example is used in that method, function, or document, will be highlighted. This really helps to quickly understand the path that the code is taking, which is great especially when you’re debugging.

Bracket Matching

PHPEclipse helps you to keep track of nested functions, conditions, and loops, by showing you which opening and closing brackets go together. If your cursor is near an opening bracket, PHPEclipse will put a box around the corresponding closing bracket, and vice-versa. This has saved me many brain burns.

Syntax Checking

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the great syntax checking of this plugin. It clearly points out any level of error, from a notice to a critical failure, both inline, and as a summary view on the right side of the document, which is like a map of your whole document that is viewable without scrolling, and from which you can jump to the various problem areas simply by clicking the warning icons. Very handy.

So, all-in-all, a very well-rounded plugin, and completely free.

Web Tools Platform

The Web Tools Platform is a plugin developed directly by the Eclipse Foundation. To use their own words, “WTP provides a generic, extensible and standards-based platform and set of tools for…Web-centric application development.” My primary use for this plugin is the great CSS editor, which has some of the same features as PHPEclipse, making it nice to work with both of them together. One of the most important features that the CSS editor includes is an outline view that will sort the style list alphabetically, grouping IDs, classes, and tags together. This makes stylesheet editing much quicker and easier, even months after the project is done when you might have to go back and make changes for your client.

And of course, it also has color coding.

I have to be honest hear and say that I used to use a separate plugin that was made exclusively for editing CSS. I liked it a little bit better because it had syntax checking, and the CSS editor included with the WTP doesn’t appear to. Unfortunately, the CSS editor I used to use hasn’t been updated since 2004, and now it’s no longer compatible with the latest release of Eclipse (3.2). I’m not too upset over it though; CSS is pretty simple as far as syntax goes, and of all the errors that I make with CSS, syntax is rarely among them.

JSEclipse

For javascript editing, I use a plugin called JSEClipse. JSEclipse includes code completion, which I personally find to be much handier in this situation, since there are many more functions that I’m unfamiliar with in javascript than in PHP.

JSEclipse is the only plugin that I use so far that isn’t free, at least not for me. If you’re a non-commercial user, i.e. you don’t develop for profit, then JSEclipse is free to you. Otherwise, you can get a single developer license for $29.

There’s also a decent alternative to JSEclipse. It comes with the Web Tools Platform described above. It’s completely free, and it also has code completion. The default color coding is not as good as JSEclipse, but I think it can be tweaked in the preferences.

Project Explorer

One thing that will throw you about Eclipse is that you can’t open a file unless it’s in an existing project. You can’t just go “File>Open” and look for the file. You have to create a project in your workspace, then create your folders and files in that project. If you want to open a file in Eclipse and it’s not in a project, you can open Windows Explorer, find the file, and then drag and drop the file directly onto the Eclipse window, into an open project, then you can open it. I think there is actually a plugin that will alter this behavior and let you open files that aren’t in a project, but I’ve never needed it. I like that Eclipse forces me to be organized. I keep my quick-do’s and odd-ball files out of Eclipse. If I need to open something quickly, and it doesn’t belong in a project, nor would it make sense to make a project for it, I just open that file in ConTEXT, which is a great little editor for small tasks. Eclipse is my mothership; it holds all my web development projects and keeps them in an organized list that is always before me as I work every day.

The Project Explorer is the outline view that shows you a list of all the projects in your workspace, as well as a collapsible document tree of any project that is open. It’s very useful, not just for browsing through projects, but also as a mini project management feature, so that you can have all of your projects in front of you as you work from day to day. More than once I’ve glanced over at that list as I’m working and realized that I probaby should be working on something else in that list.

Workspace

Lastly, there’s the Workspace, which I briefly referred to above. The workspace is basically an area in your operating system’s file structure that you have designated for Eclipse to keep projects in. You can have multiple workspaces, and you can even have multiple instances of Eclipse open, each using a different workspace. Each workspace will show a different set of projects in the projects explorer. I’ve only used one workspace ever, but I could certainly see a benefit, in some cases, of separating some projects into some major categories, and this would do the trick.

Wrap it up, already…

There is way more to Eclipse than what I’ve written here. I’ve read a lot of rants and discussion threads about development platforms for my disciplines, and rarely do I hear Eclipse mentioned. I’ve only ran into one other developer who uses PHPEclipse. I’ve always thought that was pretty crazy. Give it a try for yourself, and let me know if you come to the same conclusion that I have: Eclipse overshadows them all.