True, it's got some stuff that IE doesn't currently have built-in, like tabbed browsing and popup killing, but I get popup-killing from Google Toolbar, along with the AutoFill HTML-form-filler (which I absolutely love). Tabbed browsing never clicked with me as much as the auto-formfilling did.
I've got nothing against it, mind you. It's definitely a big step up from the old Netscape/Mozilla stuff, and I'm impressed that a free group-project was able to make such a stable and robust product. It's just not making me say "dang, it's time to dump this clunky old Internet Explorer and make the quantum leap to the future". Rather like I did when I tried out JCreator versus my old installation of Kawa.
On that note, it looks like we're going to be changing out IDE's on the Java Project That Cannot Be Named. It's not a necessary thing, but they're working hard to come up with a "magic bullet" environment that'll allow 'em to make games quickly and efficiently.
They were based around Metrowerks CodeWarrior Wireless Studio, which is a very nice tool for making J2ME apps. Problem is, it hasn't kept itself updated very well, and doing some things with it is just kludgy. For example, one thing that's important with J2ME development is the ability to target multiple devices, most with their own platform-specific extensions to the barebones MIDP toolkit. That means you'll want that stuff like conditional compilation (aka #ifdefs) and the ability to build platform-specific JAR-files (aka giving the phones with big screens the big bitmaps and the phones with small screens the small bitmaps). There are a couple of very nice build-tools that give you such abilities, namely ant and antenna, but CodeWarrior doesn't support 'em. We ended up building three different projects for the three platforms, each with their own resource directory with the screen-tuned bitmaps. And the whole #ifdef issue was just outta the question. We'd have to do any kind of platform-specific determinations at runtime, which makes code bigger than it should be.
And when you're going for a game that's about 40k, having dead code is a real issue.
I pointed out to my technical lead that Eclipse boasts support for Ant/Antenna and sent him on a quest to determine if it'd make for better building than CodeWarrior. He returned a day later to proclaim that it'd solve all of the aforementioned platform-problems, and he was gonna get our projects nicely eclipse-ed by Monday.
So I guess I'll letcha know on Monday if it worked or not. I'm keen to see how Eclipse works with the whole #ifdef issue. Since the #ifdefs are handled by Antenna, which just prunes out all code that's not to be compiled and generates a tempory .java file to compile, it stands to reason that your compiler error line-numbers are screwed, as the Java compiler will report an error on line 40 that's actually line 85 in your original source file. It'd be nice to see if they solved that problem (as every C compiler with #ifdefs solved around 1987 or so), but I'm not holding out hope.
