IntelliJ IDEA 7

It is finally here... IntelliJ IDEA 7 is out of beta and a released product... and what a nice improvement.

It has a lot of improvements to work better with Spring and Hibernate, Web Services, J2EE, JPA, JSF and GWT. It even includes top-level support for Groovy, Ruby, JRuby, Grails and Rails. There is also an easy way to import an existing Eclipse project into IDEA, which is what most of our developers use in my project. It also includes code coverage using Emma when running your JUnit tests in the IDE and a very slick Dependency Structure Matrix (DSM). And as usual, the refactoring support is much better, including support for refactoring XML, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

In summary, it is a great improvement over the previous version, and a definite upgrade.

Leopard is here

Well, after more than a week, playing with Leopard, the latest version of the Mac OSX operating system from Apple, I am sold on it.
As Walt Mossberg declares, it is not "Revolutionary" rather "Evolutionary". And the main thing is that it is a really stable version that builds on a a great foundation that was "Tiger" the previous version of the OS.

There has been extensive coverage of the new features of "Leopard" such as the ones from the NYTimes (David Pogue), USAToday, MacWorld, but the most extensive and comprehensive (in my opinion) is the one from ArsTechnica. It goes into details of both the things that you see, and the ones that are under the covers.

Personally, the features that I like the most are:

* Quick Preview: it is one of those things like QuickSilver, once you start using, you cannot imagine living without it.
* Spaces: I have used Desktop Manager before, but having it built-in the OS makes a huge difference.
* Networking: there are a few changes to the networking components including Airport that just make it easier to work with multiple networking environments.
* Screen Savers: There are a couple of really nice screen savers, specially the ones for displaying photos and mosaics.
* Mail and iCal: have much better interfaces and features. The stationery in Mail is very slick and easy to use.

And the most important feature is that everything works. VMWare Fusion released an update for "Leopard" and I haven't had any issue with any other applications. The same applies to my old Powerbook G4 that I also upgraded and handles the new OS perfectly.