47
Replies
Harbs,
I am really relieved. 
You should already have a package off list / forum, and yes, it would be very interesting to know the relative performance values for that 100 pages document.
Harbs and Steve,
thanks for leading the discussion back to the general topic. 
If you talk about consumers, your estimates might be right - the small Mom and Pop designer (whom I'd still consider professional) has heavily invested on two seats of the master suite plus all those upgrades and they are not really prepared to pay for even more to get it working, even though some of them value their saved time.
On the other end of the range there is an enormous amount of seats where 100s or 1000s of people work together, isolated from the remainder of the world by layers of admins and typical large scale IT staff. These people have their specialized solutions (with 100s of dialogs and panels, database and so forth), and otherwise are shy of compatibility issues and, given the media crisis, also the additional costs at their large scale.
There must also be those mid size agencies and in house documentation departments with similar needs, just at a smaller scale. Some of them even from other industries, who just found out that there is more than Word or XSL:FO. I think they do not frequent our typical places and will only find solutions by accident, strong advertising or if mentioned by their friendly consultant who also held the hand when the original software was installed. Sometimes I really think I should walk up all such shops in the neighborhood and grill them about their specific problems.
Dirk
Dirk, you seem to use the mac as your development machine while I work on windows. (I actually borrow a friend of mine's mac for compiling on mac)
Locate32, I think is Windows only, where build-in search is very slow. I like locate32 because I can save Search locations and reuse from dropdown.
The problem is that it doesn't show where in the file the text is found. So I drag all the results into notepad++ and run a search on all files.
Oh by the way, how much $ you sell your "sniffer" plug-in I only need 1 license.
Also on Windows, all the documentation comes as a single chm file with built-in texual search.
However, the most frustrating thing in my InDesign development is that even with debug version, there is very little information available via the immediate window since everything is hidden behind undefined functions.
For editing, I guess i'm a little old school, I still like using a text editor like notepad++.
Steven.., if you only like Notepad++, you'll love TextPad. It has full-text search in any folder and any set of files, and you can double-click the found items to immediately load&locate the original line. It has a better GREP than InDesign. It's highly configurable -- I used to compile and run BCC program directly from within it, and that's possible with any command line utility, even the ones you write yourself (in BCC, for example: run & compile, then run your own program and catch its output ... et cetera).
How does Notepad++ do with h-u-g-e files? I wrote a disassembler and loaded its output immediately into TextPad. One text file, 10 MB -- no sweat drop anywhere, not with paging up and down, not with searching, not even with replacing. It has no problem at all with the measly 6 MB JS Help XML.
Being new on the Mac, I haven't found a plain text editor yet that even comes close, and missing it dearly already 
[Jongware] wrote:
Steven.., if you only like Notepad++, you'll love TextPad. It has full-text search in any folder and any set of files, and you can double-click the found items to immediately load&locate the original line. It has a better GREP than InDesign. It's highly configurable -- I used to compile and run BCC program directly from within it, and that's possible with any command line utility, even the ones you write yourself (in BCC, for example: run & compile, then run your own program and catch its output ... et cetera).
How does Notepad++ do with h-u-g-e files? I wrote a disassembler and loaded its output immediately into TextPad. One text file, 10 MB -- no sweat drop anywhere, not with paging up and down, not with searching, not even with replacing. It has no problem at all with the measly 6 MB JS Help XML.
I guess spending money on a text editor is a hard sell, however Jongware you are a good salesman
[Jongware] wrote:
Being new on the Mac, I haven't found a plain text editor yet that even comes close, and missing it dearly already
I think BBEdit is quite popular, maybe some mac experts could comment
Dirk Becker wrote:
Steve, you know you can drag the panels around in VS? Close, build a pile, create groups, and so forth.
Yes I do know. However I'm not sure what I wrote that prompted response.
Dirk Becker wrote:
In case you were not kidding: That plugin is not for sale, it is a major unique selling point of my consulting business. Besides it needs heavy customizations for every other task. You definitely learn what interfaces not to use on certain notifications.
I was kidding, thinking that even Harbs couldn't make a Scipt/Extension/Plug-Script etc.. to compete with such a capable product.
I think BBEdit is quite popular, maybe some mac experts could comment.
I use BBEdit myself, and it's quite good. It has very good type-complete, etc. It's highly configurable, and I regularly have about 100 files open simultaneously (some of them large) and I've never experienced any trouble. It has good recovery as well.
I briefly tried TextMate and I was blown away by its features, but I found BBEdit more comfortable to use. I would only write code in the ESTK if you twisted my arm!
An additional advantage to working in BBEdit (or TextWrangler) over ESTK is that it saves Spotlight searchable files.
Harbs
No. I know most of the DOM by heart, but when I need to browse the DOM, I use either the OMV or (more likely) Jong's HTML browser.
When I need to debug a script I'll load it in the ESTK to do that there, but for simple debugging, I find that it's sometimes easier just put in an alert at the expected trouble-point and run the script from the script panel.
My aversion to the ESTK began when I had one too many crashes and lost a whole day of work... 
I have NEVER had BBEdit crash on me. Also, the code-complete of BBEdit makes sure I almost never have any typos which is the biggest source of bugs in ExtendScript.
It might be possible to load the DOM into TextMate, but that's probably not for the faint of heart...
Harbs
thanks to everyone who replied. It was very interesting and helpful to read your answers, and now I feel like I could give an answer to that question which I just KNOW I will be asked. The Forums come through again!! 
AdChoices