The lack of recent articles is due to being completely swamped. I’m hoping to find some time to write a few more soon!

Also, a new version of the Source Helper should arrive soon, with Eclipse 3.5 support and a whole lot of fixes.

Another addition to 0.2.1 is that you may now choose the line style (default is now “Eclipse”, and the other option is “IntelliJ”). The Eclipse line is the same as when you hover over a collapsible block of code in the ruler on the left.

Apart from those changes, there’s been quite a few feature requests and feedback (thanks!). I will try to accommodate as many of them as possible in the next release. One feature that is going in right away is the ability to show the “starting brace” parent, and its parent, and its parent – and so on up to a preference-set “max parent-history” limit. This will help give an even better insight into where you are in the code. Each parent will be shown in such a way that it’s obvious that they are the nested parent-parents, and the idea is to keep the window small as before (by default anyway).

I will be on vacation next week so it will be sometime early February probably when the new release comes out. Feel free to post comments/requests until then of course. New code is in the usual place, with new source. The screenshots have not been updated yet to reflect 0.2.1 but reflect 0.2.0, so I suggest you try it out to see the new stuff.

To see what’s new, including fresh screenshots, head over to the sourcehelper page located here. Enjoy!

As you can probably tell, the site has gone through an overhaul and been completely replaced. The old site was very static, and a big pain to update.  I had grand plans back in the day to build an admin interface for it, but it just never happened (other projects always took precedence). Plus it wasn’t exactly a site built for making any changes or posts as it was quite space limited.

In any case, as I’ve felt like writing a few articles and such over the years and I wanted to incorporate that into the new site design, I browsed around to see what blogging sites (a word I hate) are using nowadays and came across WordPress which seems to be a very popular blogging backend that is self-hosted. I’ve tested a few blogging “API’s” in the past, but none really seemed to fit into what I wanted to do.

At first inspection, WordPress seemed to fit the bill quite well. It comes with plugin capabilities and there’s literally thousands of plugins out there already (always a good sign that a third party product is popular and community focused), and it also comes with thousands of “themes”, some quite professional and nice, and others less so. And of course, it’s completely free and incredibly well documented. Two words that don’t usually go together in the world of free third party code.

WordPress however is aimed towards that you either run it as a blog only, or incorporate your entire site into it – so every page is WordPress “hosted”. I was at first against this, mostly as I figured there was just “no way” I could customize some pages more than what a “blogging tool” could handle. But after playing around with it for a while I realized that it would be much more work trying to escape WordPress instead of letting it do the job. So I slowly succumbed and let WordPress handle the entire site. It was a good choice as it does it wonderfully, and despite a few hiccups along the way, I have found no irritating moments apart from the usual CSS/HTML madness with IE/FireFox/etc (thank god I don’t do much web development anymore, UI programming has less hassles!).

As for the theme, it’s not a WordPress theme that’s available for download. Even though there are nice ones, I’d hate for my site to look like some other site out there. So I sketched up some designs in Photoshop, and stuck to the one you now see. It’s a pretty “uneventful” theme as themes go, quite colorless and bland compared to many others out there, but I think it fits my style and the intent of the site.

The site isn’t exactly “done” yet, there’s undoubtedly a few tweaks left to do, but most of the old content has been transferred over and been updated so that widgets / documentation can still be found in the same place as before.

In any case, I look forward to doing regular posts and stories from my life as a UI coder (Eclipse, RCP, SWT, Java, C#, etc etc). Hopefully something interesting for everyone! And all the old content is still on the site as well, for those that could care less about articles and want to go straight to the code. Oh, and of course, there’s built-in RSS support (see the footer) for both posts and comments, so you don’t even have to come here anymore to see what’s new! Great isn’t it!?

Comments are welcome, and if you see something I missed, let me know!