SlickEdit (Or, Time for A Commercial Break)

I have more and more run into the need to work in various development environments lately, mainly going back and forth between Windows coupled with Visual Studio and various flavors of Unix with GCC or MinGW coupled with various text editors. On the Windows side, things are great. I will admit complete and total bias when it comes to using Visual Studio with Visual Assist. Nothing beats that combination for developing a C++ application, hands down. On the Unix side, however, I have been searching for a way to simplify my workflow and remove the need to work so heavily through the command line. Sure, the command line is more powerful than any user-friendly GUI will be without a heavy amount of tweaking and menus, but 99.5% of the time I don't need the power of the command line, I want the ease of use speed of an IDE that will let me drag and drop things, press a button to compile, another button to run, and click in some breakpoints here and there.

A few days ago, my prayers were seemingly answered in the form of SlickEdit. It very easily lets me set up to use my pre-existing makefiles to build everything, while also offering the ability to have my workspace visually set up, allowing me to navigate through files easily and debug my applications in a visual interface, rather than through GDB command line. I haven't had a chance to fully go through SlickEdit's feature set yet, but I can say that I have seen enough to recommend it if you find yourself in a similar situation. I don't normally outright advertise a product here, but for this one, I will. Go get it here. If you're one of those people who like to know all the ins and outs of your tools, pick up the book here.

Sick Day

It seems I was a bit incapacitated this week, so rather than a rant, here is something you may not have seen. At GDC in 2004, Pete Isensee outlined several common areas of performance loss in games found after analyzing the source of many titles for the XBOX. Whether or not you deem yourself to be an optimization guru and master of C++, this presentation is still very much worth your time. Check out his presentation here, get the slides here.

I'm Back!

Apparently "soon" is a relative term. The reason I have been gone so long is that I just finished up work on the recently released Nintendo Zone app included with the December 3DS update. I guess that gives away where the new job is! Things are going pretty well and life is beginning to settle down into a regular pattern, so I'm going to give this blogging thing another go. See you all tomorrow!

Rubber Ducking?

It's been a while since I've made a blog post, and I don't have anything major to post about right now, so I figured I'd toss up something light and interesting. Apparently there is a development / debugging technique known as Rubber Ducking. The idea that we as developers should keep a rubber duck by our desks at all times to help us get through debugging strange bugs and ironing out the kinks in our systems. What's funny is that I am of the opinion that this might actually be a good practice... rubber duckies for everyone!

nVidia's new Parallel Nsight

This is quite possibly one of the most awesome things I have seen recently. nVidia, someone needs to bake you a tray of cookies. In short, nVidia unveiled their feature-rich graphics debugging tools for Visual Studio. I'm not even going to try to go over it here, just follow this link.

Server down!

I've forgotten to mention that the server which all of my demos are hosted on is currently down. It will be back up in a while (likely a week or so). This is due to having moved and not having the time to orchestrate the timing of reconfiguring a router that doesn't belong to me. I apologize to anyone this inconveniences in the mean time.

Life's changes. . .

Wow. Life. If you've been wonder what happened to me for the last few months, that sentence about sums it up. Since my last post I quit my old job, got a new one, and moved across the country just in time to catch a storm which left 3½ft of water in my basement. Life. All that aside, things are pretty good, so I can't really complain. New stuff coming soon, just thought I'd let you all know I'm still alive.