Arachnophilia

Download from… http://www.arachnoid.com/arachnophilia

Download size… 1.59MB
Installation size… 1.54MB

Unlike most of the other editors, Arachnophilia is designed specifically for web development. It used to be my editor of choice, but that was version 4.0 (which you can still download from the site). Since then it’s been converted to Java so it will run on most platforms. Unfortunately, as most people will appreciate, that also means it runs like, well, a dog. Particularly to start. It’s slimline in size, but that’s for a reason – there aren’t many options.

It looks as if it’s been designed by someone from Fisher Price and lacks basic facilities such as word wrap and an explorer bar. There is line numbering a good browser launch system, as well as useful features such as the ability to auto-complete an image size.

In an attempt to make an editor for all people he’s made it difficult to use because it doesn’t perform how we expect it to.

I used Arachnophilia in it’s non-Java form because it was quick to use as a simple editor (although it lacked PHP syntax colouring). Now it’s even lost that. It comes with a Windows Installer but.. and this is always a bug-bear of mine… there’s no uninstall option without going into Control Panel.

Summary of Arachnophilia

Slow editor that lacks facilities and looks awful.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 22nd November 2007.

Source Edit

Download from… http://www.brixoft.net

Download size… 3.73Mb
Installation size… 3.88Mb

This is a quite powerful editor, very similar to a commercial one that I use at work (my day job… not web development). In fact, the site even has a syntax highlighter for the obscure language that I programme in at work (a first that I know of – we had to write our own for the product we use). As with some of the other products I review, this is a generic code editor, which includes compiler options amongst other things. Never-the-less everything I look at specifically have facilities for web coding.

Again, this looks a little old-fashioned, but it’s compact and quick. Line numbering can be turned on, as can word wrap but this is where I came across it’s big problem. Word wrap occurs at a set column position – by default at position 80. All the other products I use wrap to the side of the window, so if you re-size it, the word wrap changes. Indeed, there’s a further problem with the word wrap – where lines wrap onto seperate lines, they are given their own line numbers. So, in the test I used, I had a 24 line piece of code but after turning on word wrap it was 27 lines – this means that debugging code will become harder as line numbers reported by, say, PHP will not correlate unless you turn the word wrap off. I looked in the configuration but couldn’t find a way to change this – I’m sure some people prefer it this way, but I’d at least like a way of changing it.

On top of that there’s little support, or something that will do an equivalent, for launching the code in a browser – just viewing it in the default browser. A crude macro facility exists but I can’t see a way of passing the current file name into it. Maybe there is something but after the word wrapping problem, I pretty much gave up the product.

Summary

Seems quite powerful but unusual for me because of its line wrapping problems, so 3 out of 5 stars.

These days the popular thing to do is to release software in Beta status, the Beta being more of a status symbol (and to cover your back in case the software doesn’t work) rather than anything.

Unfortunately, it appears to be making companies sloppy. Beta is one thing, but a lot of this software is more alpha quality. In fact, in some cases I’d argue it’s not even that – it’s blatantly not been tested at all before being released.

The latest of these is Apples Safari 3.0.4. Promising lots of improvements, many, many XP users are finding it constantly crashed when being launched. The Apple forums have a “workaround” which many are finding doesn’t work. And I’m one of them.

In fact, I decided to re-install 3.0.3 and found that too crashed. This time, however, the workaround worked and I’m happily working with that version for the time being.

Let’s see how long it takes Apple to fix the issue….

And here’s another. Netgear released a firmware update for a range of its wireless routers on the 3rd November. It worked in so-far as that it stopped most wireless connections from working. So, well tested, eh?

The Netgear forums were a hive of activity, with lots of users having problems. The workaround, as with the Apple issue, was to roll back to a previous release.

Except that today – 16 days later – the same broken firmware is still on their website for download.

Maybe they don’t read their own forums and don’t know about it? Except I reported it a week ago to their technical team and they advised me it “had been passed to the appropriate department”. Hmmm.

And that’s not even masquerading as a beta release!

What’s going on here?