Kieran SeniorAn Ode To Software

I actually bought some software for once, that being Pixelmator. To be perfectly honest with you, it’s an absolute steal for the actual cost. At the moment it’s roughly £42 GBP, compare that to Photoshop’s cost and then take into account the chances are you won’t use a great deal of Photoshop’s features. I’m not saying Photoshop isn’t a bad product, it’s extremely good, but from the extensive use I had of it, it appeared many of the tools weren’t suited for the work I did with it.

Now that I’m working on my Mac instead of using Windows I wanted something other than GIMP. I’ve never got on with GIMP at all, I find it difficult to use and not very user friendly. Some people are really quite amazing using it, but for me personally it just doesn’t cut it.

Anyway, moving swiftly on to my point. Pixelmator uses Apple’s built-in colour picker which I think is a great idea, but Apple’s built-in colour picker doesn’t have a hexadecimal picker, and for the large amounts of work I do with the web that just doesn’t really help me much. Well, that’s extremely simple to solve seeing as though someone’s provided one. Just drag and drop it into Library/ColorPickers and make sure you restart Pixelmator if its already open. This time a new tab will be available with a gigantic hex value.

Fortunately for me I started out software development in the times where Java-based IDE’s were available meaning I’d use the same one in Linux and Windows. Now that I primarily develop in Mac OS X I need to make sure that I can work alongside team mates whom work under Linux or Windows. Fortunately we can all have the same Subversion client, the same IDE, and generally the same plug-ins whilst working on the same project but under different environments.

The very first thing you’ll want to do is get the subversion binaries and install them in the dmg format provided if you’re on Mac. It took minutes to get this part setup and is generally very straightforward.

As we’re working on a PHP project we first headed over to the Eclipse PDT page and got the all-in-one package as this means we don’t have to do any setting up of any kind. I’ve found getting a base install of Eclipse and then figuring out how to add the PDT plug-in later on generally causes more problems for me. The only downside to getting the all-in-one package is that it won’t be the latest build of Eclipse, if you’re okay with that.

The second step was to install the Subclipse plugin. To do this you simply open Eclipse, hit “Help” then “Software Updates”, click on the “Available Software” tab, then click on “Add Site” and enter http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x into the input box (make sure you always use the latest version however). Once you click okay Eclipse should install Subclipse in the background. You must ensure you have an installation of the subversion binary for this to work, otherwise you can get some random errors that confuse you.

Once this was set up myself and my team mate went on to unfuddle, an extremely good project management and subversion base and set up our repository and project. We then right-clicked on our repository pane in Eclipse and hit the “Create Repository” button and entered the relative details. From here, as long as you understand subversion basics, I’m sure you’ll get along with it just fine. The very first thing we tend to do is to create folders “branches”, “tags”, and “trunk” which is just a standard set up. Following this, as it’s a web project, we create the folders “admin”, “include” and “content” within the trunk folder.