I gave the latest snapshot of Iguana a spin today to get a peek at some of the new features that will be part of 5.0.7 release.
I put some screen shots into the wiki under the What’s New section.
The code navigation is exciting. It goes well beyond what traditional IDEs like Visual Studio offer. It allows you to navigate through the calls into the functions rather than just the functions themselves. That adds a lot of power into understanding the logic flow within a mapping script.
It is quite jaw dropping seeing what the team is achieving with the translator. IDEs are an area of software which in my opinion haven’t shown a lot of innovation in the last 5 years. A big part of the problem is a lack of viable business models for companies in this area. Things have stagnated into just Visual Studio and Eclipse. These environments have gotten large and complicated.
Our focus on integration provides a great engine to push things forward in this area.
Visual Studio and Eclipse have too many developers working on them. They support an overwhelmingly wide range of languages and functionality. All this weighs heavily when it comes to having the freedom to innovate. In a sense these products have reached a point that it’s hard to move them forward without breaking compatibility with all their existing behavior. They feel like web browsers before Google showed us how minimalist a browser could be.
One of the over-riding goals we have with the translator is to keep it a very simple environment that flows naturally even as we add new features. All the new functionality like the error trace window, docking of dialogs and code navigation are in harmony with that goal. The new functionality is cleanly integrated in a natural manner making it easy to discover these features when and as you need them.
Let us know what you think. Of the new features, which do you think you will find the most useful?