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What's News in the PlayBasic world ? - Find out here.
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New PlayBasic IDE In Development
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By: Kevin Picone Added: August 10th, 2011
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Category: All,IDE
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Been back working in the PlayBasic trenches since late June really. The main focus throughout this period has been on the replacement IDE project. What's wrong with the existing IDE ? - Well, nothing really... It's just not being actively developed anymore. It's a familiar story, you know, language needs IDE, excited programmer takes up the challenge and sooner or later moves onto something else. Which puts pressure on the overall PlayBasic time line.
After looking for replacement options it became clear the only viable alternative was to build a replacement IDE myself. I actually started the project a while back, but ironically that was soon shelved, as that project was taken over by another 3rd party. But sadly the light flickered out all too well. So it's fallen back into my lap.
Now obviously writing something like an IDE, isn't a job that I take lightly, nor is it something that can be knocked together quickler either. Which means the initial releases of the package may well be missing some features from PlayWRITE. The upside is we get to build it exactly the suit the PlayBasic + FX.
So far development of the tool is currently just entering the early Alpha testing stage. Consisting nothing more than the bare essentials to handle the life cycle of the your projects code. So you can create a project, edit, test and save it. That's about it.
The first thing existing users will notice and probably the biggest change thus far, would be the move away from the tabbed project interface, towards a more free range layout. So multi source projects are no longer only accessible through the tab across the top of your project window, but each sources roam free in separate window. All the main controls are located on a side panel also (subject to change), where you can manage the current project in focus. Stuff like adding new sources, removing them, changing the build order, default screen modes etc etc
Simplicity is a big focus this time around, we're really trying to weed out what's really necessary from the gloss. In fact the current ALPHA would be lucky to have a quarter of the controls from PlayWRITE at this point, without really missing any of the main functionality either. Which we feel is going to be lot better for new users.
It's not all about trimming the fat though, as the current build has a few nice new features also. Some that come to mind, would be the vastly improved project building speed (over 20K lines per second), better search engine for the doc's browser and the ability to toggle between compilers. Which means you can elect to build your project with PlayBasic or PlayBasic FX with a simple switch. Which is very handy.
So when will it be available ? - Dunno, we're expecting to move from Alpha to a light Beta testing phase in the coming weeks. So it could possibly see a public release after that. I'm not anticipating it being 'final' for some time though.
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