The older MySQL Administrator and the accompanying MySQL Query Browser were tools that were much beloved, that you kept going back to, and using over and over again,  like a nice fitting driving gloves, comfortable, useful, and empowering.  Since I started working with MySQL, I can’t remember not having them on my desktop, ready at a moments notice.

Because of that, I have looked upon MySQL Workbench with much suspicion and doubt. And indeed before this release, I would say the MySQL Workbench could not replace the previous Administrator and Query Browser. Now, I’m not too sure. With this release that has changed. Workbench includes the integration of MySQL Administrator, and MySQL Query Browser into an integrated environment, with much potential for growth through plug-ins, much like Eclipse, although don’t get me started on the integration of Eclipse plug-ins, another topic.

Workbench is like the French three-pronged fleur-de-lis, three separate tool areas open from a central core, Workbench Central.

Workbench Central

Workbench makes heavy use of “breadcrumb” like menus without tabs. Menus run horizontally across different windows in the Workbench, and clicking on the name brings you to the next screen. It took a second to get use to, but once I did, I liked the layout and the way workbench integrated.

You go back to Workbench Central by clicking “Home” in the upper left. If you click on any of your db connections, or menus across the top,  you enter into one of the three program areas: SQL Development with Query Browser, Data Modeling, and Server Administrator. It is obvious that each of these three sections is its own program, as they each take awhile to open at first.

Before MySQL Workbench folks were using DBDesigner to model their databases and do their EER diagrams. The Data Modeling section probably needs a little clean up and streamlining, as it opens rather “clunkily,” but once open works well.

Workbench Data Modeling

The administrator works well, but needs a little configuring as it checks your connections, and let’s you know if your missing an ini file or config setting.     You can configure multiple database connections to multiple servers, and reach each database with a click of the mouse.  The Administrator includes a series of graphs along the top of the window, which look nice, but I’m not sure are that useful.   The Administrator is laid out horizontally in keeping with the overall layout template of the Workbench, but I think I like the original Administrators vertical menus a little better.

Workbench Administrator

You can tell the Development Team has put some time into the Query Browser, and it shows.  You’ll find that the Query Browser is an improvement over the previous independent version. A red error x pops up as you type a query if you have the syntax wrong, this is immediate, instead of waiting until after you execute the query, very nice.  Query’s form a horizontal s menu along the top of the window as you make them, yes, the older version had this, but this is more automatic. Errors are reported when you execute the query, the same as the old version, with an obtuse error number.  My only gripe, which has nothing to do with the current Workbench, as the same was true of the previous version, is I wish the error messages were a tad more verbose.

Workbench Query Browser

MySQL Workbench is coming into its own and is starting to show the promise in its developer’s eyes.  The Developers Tools Team should be applauded for their dedication and persistence to get it right, and the outcome of this dedication is that MySQL Workbench is getting better and better.   I would look for the official release to follow closely after this RC 3 release.  I recommend you not wait for the official release,  go ahead, and get this release now, and start using it.  There is much to discover as you integrate Workbench into your databases, and begin working with it.  Enjoy.

Web developers use frameworks to make their development go quicker, easier, and more organized. This ultimately leads to repeatability. If I use the same framework each time I develop a web application, often times I can repeat what I’ve already written in a previous application, and the frameworks syntax and organization is already known to me. Everything becomes quicker. For those doing freelance development, quicker means more development jobs, and ultimately more money.

Since I want to complete my applications quicker, I want the framework to help me do that, or else why would I use it. Things I want the framework to help me with are things like validation, forms, the database , internationalization, ajax, and security. Here’s what I ideally want from a framework.

• Built in security. I want to know if I use the framework, my application will be secure from hackers.
• I want my classes to be automatically loaded through out the application, instead of having to remember where they are located and have to physically load them, called an autoloader.
• I want a way to translate database sql to objects and make my interaction with a relational database easier, called an ORM.
• A logical organization of files and places to put the various types of files I have so that everything works well together
• A rich set of helper applications to make my coding go faster and more intuitive.
• A way to make my URL’s easier to read and thus, easier to categorize by the search engines.
• I want a quick framework. I already give up some speed by using a framework. I don’t want my customers saying my application is a dog.

All of the above is goodness, but most important is I don’t want to have to spend hours having to figure out how to use the framework. The framework should be easy to learn, with good documentation leading me into each section of the code. Good documentation explains what that section is about, and gives you a code snippet to show you how to use it and the syntax.

When I’m knee deep in an application, and run into a problem, I want to know I can get some help if not from the documentation, then from an active forum.

You may not have a choice of what framework you use. You might join a company that has already standardized on a framework, and you’ll have no choice, but to learn that framework. For the freelancers out there, let’s take a final look at the current frameworks from the above perspective.

• In the relatively slow category, I would put the following frameworks, Cake, Symfony1.2.4, and Zend.
• In the not well supported, or used, I would place: Fuse and Solar.
• In the, rails-like, and slow category: Akelos and Qcodo. This may be tad unfair, since there was only one Akelos benchmark, and no Qcodo benchmark, but my thought is the code generation overhead may get in the way of the speed. We need more benchmarks on these two to tell.
• In the new architecture, or new versions, and not yet well documented category, I’d place: Kohana 3 and Symfony 2, which is not yet officially released.
• In the not all PHP5 object-oriented class: Codeigniter.
• In the light on security and features class: DooPHP.

The way I see it that leaves you with only one framework left standing, Yii. Yii is quick, PHP5 only, has good security, a good user community, and good documentation. Yii uses a slightly different architecture then straight MVC, but it’s not that far off and seems easy to grasp.

DooPHP, the quickest of the bunch, is still relatively new and light on features, like security, but it is well documented if you want to go really light. Both should be relatively easy to learn.

That’s the story, but only at this point in time, June, 2010. I don’t see Cake, Akelos, Zend, and probably Qcodo changing much in speed or architecture in the future. Symfony2 is certainly fast enough to be considered, if the learning curve is easier, it too would be a viable candidate. Codeigniter 2, whenever that comes, could blow us away. And finally, Kohana 3 could really improve their documentation over the next couple of months to regain its former high rating, and become more than a viable contender, only time will tell. Chow.

In selecting these frameworks, I have eliminated commercial frameworks, specialized frameworks, component frameworks, frameworks with CMS, and frameworks that are no longer in development. You want a supported framework with developers working on improving the framework.

This drops the list from over 70 to 10 frameworks consisting of, needless to say, currently the most popular frameworks: Akelos, CakePHP, Codeigniter, DooPHP, Fuse, Kohana, Qcodo, Solar, Symfony, Yii, and Zend. If I missed a couple, we’ll get them next time. I’m going to go over these one at a time and just give you my impressions.

Akelos was made to mimic Ruby on Rails in PHP with an MVC architechture. It offers code generation, scaffolding, and i18n internationalization. It has good documentation offering tutorials, videos, a manual and a wiki. I’d rate their doc a 4.0 on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being best. It has a fairly active forum. Akelos uses Active Records, like Rails, for database hookup. It runs both PHP4 and 5, and therefore is not truly object oriented. My initial impression of Akelos is it is farily bloated, and almost too aligned with its Rails clone image.

CakePHP has an excellent and passionate user community. Documentation is just OK, I rated it a 2.0. There are currently four books published on CakePHP. However, I did not see any tutorials, or videos on their site. They have an API, but send readers to buy the books to learn Cake. Cake is very restrictive in the way things are connected in your application. Although people rave about this frameworks automatic connections, because of their strict naming conventions, if I was just starting out, I would pass, the learning curve seems steep compared to other frameworks, and the performance is not there.

Codeigniter has excellent documentation, they have video tutorials, tutorials, a user’s manual, a wiki, and an active forum. There are four books published on Codeigniter. I rate their documentation at 4.5. Codeigniter is one of the quickest frameworks. However, it is still PHP4 based. They have said they are working on Codeigniter 2.0 based on PHP5, but it will not be fully PHP5 until version 2.1. Codeigniter is made by Ellis Labs who have treated it as a hobby, and notoriously have taken a very long time between releases, which is one of the reasons Kohana spun off a fork. Don’t expect 2.0 to be soon, but their working on it.

DooPHP claims it is the “fastest PHP framework,” and if their benchmarks are to be believed, it truly can haul butt. It supports PHP5 only, an ORM,  i18n international, templates, and URI routing. However, it achieves this speed by being light in its functionality and implementation, and at present there is no consideration of overall security. Their documentation and web site are excellent, and well written. I rate the docs a 4.00. Although they do not have videos, or a wiki, they have an excellent online manual, a class API, and tutorials to get you started. They have an active forum. My impression is they are still a little early in their development.

Fuse barely made this list. There were no benchmarks. However it is PHP5 based with an ORM and URI routing. They have a video, a wiki, and a class API with good install documentation. However, their documentation is sparse, and I rate it only a 1.5. There last forum update was two weeks ago. This framework feels like it is subsidiing with its last release in June of 2009.

Kohana is always changing and there lies its problems. When it forked from Codeigniter it quickly became popular as the PHP5 object oriented Codeigniter, and it is almost as fast as Codeigniter. It had good documentation for Kohana 2.4, however they just released 3.0 where they introduced a completely new architecture. They did this to become the only PHP framework supporting the HMVC architecture, read this as multiple MVC’s on multiple servers all connected. I think they made this change knowing Codeigniter is working on their PHP5 version, and they wanted to separate themselves. However, at this writing, their documentation is awful for 3.0, which is what they recommend you use for a new project. I rate it a 1.0. There are no tutorials, no videos, and no books, just a sparse wiki and API. The forum is not really there yet. At this writing their lack of 3.0 documentation and support is enough to choose another framework, or use Kohana 2.4. Again, they just released 3.0. I do expect the documentation to get better, as they do have an active community, that will gradually build their new documentation, and when they do, Kohana’s HMVC will again, emerge as a premier framework for large projects. Kohana gives me the impression that it is made for those that know PHP5 cold, and know what they are doing, not for the beginner.

Qcodo is similar to Akelos in that it models itself on Rails. It is PHP5 based, offers scaffolding, code generation, something called Qforms,  i18n, and database profiling. They advertise a rapid application development platform that rolls out in minutes instead of hours. However, I found no benchmarks on Qcodo, and I suspect some bloat here due to the code generation. I put them in the same category and performance as Akelos, with Akelos in the lead, because of their documentation, although they are newer and are PHP5 only. Qcodo’s documentation is lacking, there are no videos, no wiki, no tutorials, not a good install doc, but they do have some online docs, and a Class API. I rate their doc at 1.5. They do have an active forum.

Solar almost did not make this list, but I found some benchmarks so I included them. They are PHP5 and MVC, with a good form modeler, but no ORM. Their documentation is OK. They do not have video tutorials, but they do have tutorials, and very good online documentation integrated with the API. I rate their doc a 2.5, but sadly I could not find a forum.

Symfony 1.4.2 was in the CakePHP performance category, a dog. Their new release 2.0 is three times quicker, and now respectable. However, their new release is not out for another month or so. You can get the preview release now, which is how benchmarks on the 2.0 framework started showing up. Symfony has a wide following at the corporate level. It has a reputation as being difficult to learn as evidence by their seven published books. It’s documentation falls into the same category as Kohana, slim on the new release and better on the old release. The old version has video tutorials, tutorials, documentation, no wiki, and their install doc is so-so. I rate their old documentation a 2.5 and their new version a 0.5. They have an active forum.

Yii started out as a competitor to Kohana. It is PHP 5 only, they use an Active Records, i18n, and themes. They initially generate the site from the command line. They bill themselves as an MVC, but they use a front-end application controller that distributes to other controllers, which is not strictly MVC. Yii is reusable and extensible. It’s fast and just as quick as Kohana and Codeigniter. For awhile, Kohana had its way, but gradually over time Yii has been coming on strong, due to greatly improving documentation. Now with the release of Kohana 3.0, I’d have to give the nod to Yii. Yii’s current documentation is excellent, they have good install docs, tutorials, a Class API, and good online docs. They do not have video tutorials, or a wiki, but I still rate their documentation at 4.5. They have an active forum and a growing user base.

Zend is a rich library, since the Zend framework is supported by Zend the makers of PHP, it is up to date and full of functionality. However, it is bloated, almost reminds me of the PEAR library, instead of a framework, and their performance shows it. Unfortunately Zend uses the framework as a “come on” for you to buy their other products. The documentation for the framework is buried around their commercial products on their web site, and hard to find. When you get to it, it is thorough with a Class API, however there are no tutorials. Zend has the reputation as being difficult to learn, and hard to use. There are currently 6 published books about it. I rate their documentation at a 3.0. Zend integrates their framework into their commercial tools, and tries to lock you into using the framework, because of that integration. They have an active forum.

That’s it for now, I will sum this all up in a summary and conclusion in my next article.

To separate these 46 editors I came up with a list of criteria I wanted.

• The editor had to run on Windows, Linux, and the Mac, and look the same. No matter what platform I used, I did not want to relearn a new merge tool, and I wanted it to be the same so there was no slow down in my work. This criteria alone cut the list down to 20 editors.
• Since there were so many editors out there, and there was not that much difference in their functionality, I decided I wanted a free or open source editor. This cut the list down to 14 editors.
• I wanted an editor that handled both difference in two files, and merging three files in one editor. We’re down to five editors: kdiff3, Sourcegear’s diffmerge, Perforce’s P4Merge, vimdiff, and xxdiff. A quick way to separate these five is to go to Google Images and search for the above editor’s name to see a screen shot of the editor.
• I wanted a modern looking editor that didn’t look like it was made to run in Dos. We’re down to three: kdiff3, Sourcegear diffmerge, and Perforce PP4Merge with kdiff3 being borderline.
• And finally I wanted lines running between the two files comparing the differences, as opposed to bars running vertically along the side of the page. This is a personal preference, but it seems like an easier way to work for me. This left one: Perforce P4Merge.

P4Merge comes as a free utility with the Perforce Client. Perforce makes version control software for large organizations with a client server set up, where you load the client on each user’s computer. Because of this, and to be fair, P4Merge does not have some features, that if your looking for, you should try another editor. P4Merge does not handle version control browsing, binary comparison, directory comparison, syntax highlighting, or reports. What it does handle well is resolving file differences.

P4Merge comes bundled as a separate utility with Perforce’s commercial version control software client. To get it, go here, and click on your platform under “The Perforce Client (P4V).” You will download a 22Mb file that contains several pieces of software, click on the .exe to to start the install. When it asks you to select application packages, select P4Merge and the command line tool. You do not need the Client or SCC plugin. P4Merge will install and your all set.

Install showing not installing Client or SCC module

Working with you local server. Ignore instructions and put in localhost.

Here’s some screen shots of the editor with two files and three files. On the merge tool with the three files shown below, notice the tree with icons in the upper left showing you exactly how you are merging.  I haven’t seen another editor with this feature.  Each window is color and icon coded so you know exactly which is the base, local, and remote version.  You edit in the lower window and you can switch which version you edit by clicking on the icons on the right.  Notice also that the lines run across the screen showing you where the edits need to be resolved.

P4Merge showing two files with differences

P4Merge showing a Merge window for three files

Once you edit your changes,  and save the resulting merge file, you’ll want commit your changes in your version control software,  now that you’ve resolved your conflicts.  The results should be that there will no longer be any conflicts when you do your commit.

Overall, P4Merge is an exceptionally nice merge tool. It is easy to use, nice looking, and works well with Git, my version control software. If you’d like to configure it with Git, please see my article on: “Installing Perforce’s P4Merge in Git for Windows.”

I have to give Perforce’s P4Merge a 5-star rating, and thank Perforce for making such a nice file comparison tool available to the community.

I had evaluated CSS Frameworks about a year and a half ago notably Yahoo’s YUI grids, Elements, Blueprint, Tripoli, Hartija, and BlueTrip.  Elements included a folder systems for the entire site.  BlueTrip is Tripoli and Blueprint combined.  YUI, Blueprint, and BlueTrip feature a grid system to make multiple columns easier to implement.  Hartija is for printing.  Tripoli is a minimal framework that features a reset and font styling, but no column grids.

The outcome of the above review was I decided I had no problem making grids in CSS.  These frameworks seemed to add a lot of bloat with a learning curve.  I did not need a folder set up. I needed to have browser compatibility handled by Tripoli, and needed printing, handled by Hartija.  That’s what I settled on and use with all my sites.

I searched for CSS Frameworks and found some new ones I missed in my earlier survey:  “960″ was new and looked nice, then there was jQuery UI framework, and YAML.  I didn’t jump to  look at any of these until I ran across a framework called Elasticss or Elastic CSS.

What hooked me on taking a closer look at Elastic.  A very simple grid system, elastic or fixed width columns, built-in event handling, and elastic and fixed height columns.  The last two features is what hooked me, no other framework I saw offered built in event handling and variable height columns, except maybe jQueryUi, which looked a lot more complicated to implement.  I decided to give Elastic a look.

I downloaded it, set up an HTML page, and started to link in their CSS and Javascript libraries.  And that’s where I started having trouble.

I just could not get the thing to work initially.  I had problems with understanding how to set up the html tags to make the framework work.

The elastic site had documentation, but it had problems.  It seemed complete, but what was wrong, was the developer had changed the syntax from one release to another and had some documentation one way, and some the other, which made things very confusing when the site didn’t work.

The way I made it work was to look at their demo pages, view the page source in the browser, and copy there tags to my html page.

After I got everything working, I had mixed results.  On the plus side, their column system is excellent, and is not really a grid system. It features English language intuitive syntax. It is the easiest column system I have run across.  Columns are very flexible and easily re-size across the page and can be multilayer.   The ease of making columns, with intuitive English tags, alone would make me consider using this framework.

Html file showing Elastic CSS English language column syntax

The event handling was accomplished by linking in jQuery with the framework.  I was happy with this, since once jQuery was linked in, I could use it on the site, and with other plug-ins.  It did all the normal framework things well, like layout, browser reset, printing, and font styling.

On the minus side, I could not get the variable height columns working, and this was the main reason I evaluated the framework, and I tried.  I figured maybe a piece of the code had an error.

I put all the CSS through a validator and found two of the six CSS files did not validate, nor did the javascript come up clean.  I was not sure by the error, whether a  “*font-size”  tag, for example, which throws an error in the validator, was somehow part of the framework, or simply should be taken out and made “font-size.”

I was almost already to far into it when I wondered if I had the absolute latest version, I decided to download the entire project located on github.  Did I mention how much I love git and github.

I opened the project, used the latest files, and still could not get the heights to adjust.  Bummer.

The resulting web page from the above Html file with CSS styling.

Elastic CSS looks to be about a year and a half old from its inception.  My hope is the developers will keep working, I think they could eventually have something special.  Right now, however, I don’t think Elastic is quite there yet.

Here’s what I want from a CSS Framework, and so far, I haven’t found one that has it all.  If anyone knows of a framework with these features please let me know.  An easily understood and implemented multiple column system that handles elastic, jello, and fixed layouts, the same identical page in all browsers, print formatting, vertical column flexibility to eliminate “faux columns,” and make columns have equal heights, the ability to style layouts, fonts, and colors easily across the site in separate css files.  jQuery integrated with the framework.  Finally, all of this imported with one line into a skeleton xhtml file that is a template to produce your page, and when I unzip the file and place it on my server, everything is linked up.  Now that would save  me time and is worth the cost of admission.

In thinking about what I’m asking for, it doesn’t seem that unattainable, what it takes is someone with some spare cycles to put it together, or for the Elastic developers to polish their already nice framework to get the heights to work out of the box.   It also would be nice if everything validated.   I have my fingers crossed.

If you’re like me, you put up with this agonizing long search for your file, because nothing else was available. But then again, every once in awhile, a ray of light shines down upon us poor, dumb, computer users, and you realize you’ve been blessed with a piece of software that works and works great.

This particular program grew on me, crept up on me, to the point where I now can’t do without it on Windows. It’s hard to change the way you work with a computer over all these years, so change comes gradually at times. Enough of the platitudes, let me paint you a scenario.

You are up surfing the Web and you find a new program to download, or an update to one of your existing programs, like Firefox or Thunderbird. Have you ever noticed how the download file name is a bunch of gibberish. You download the program, and your set to install. Ah, where’s the file you downloaded? It’s happen to me several times, even if I think its in my download directory, I’ve still lost it. What do you do? Watch the wagging tail again? No! I mean hell no!

You download a program called, Everything. It use to be called Search Everything, and that’s what it does. The program works on Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, and Windows 7.

This search program works differently than other search programs. You install the program and during the install, it indexes all the files and folders on your computer. The indexing is fast. If you have a million files and folders, it will take you about one minute total on the install to build its index. After that, it automatically, updates its index on every new file and folder added, downloaded, or deleted from your system with out you doing anything.

So why is it so good. Let me count the ways. This is the fastest search engine I have found anywhere, and I mean fast. When you open the program a window opens, instantly, with all the files and folders on your system shown, yep, all million of them if you care to do some scrolling. But why do that when you have a search bar right up there at the top of the screen.

As you type in the search bar, you filter your files and folders out of the window. So every character you type reduces the list until you end up with the file you wanted. It is filtering the list as you type. Did I say it was fast. It is almost fun to search now to watch all the files melt away.

The user interface at first doesn’t look that great, it grows on you. Other search engines, ask you to put your search in a particular form field box for say, a file extension. I don’t find this helpful, as it makes me have to think about what I need, when all I really want to do is find the file. You do this all from the one search box in Everything.

If you want a png file, you could search on “*.png”.  You can use regular expressions, wild cards *, one character ?,  Boolean AND, OR, and NOT. You search every file and folder on your system, alas it does not search inside the file itself.  I could call it a drawback, but there’s other tools for that.

Once you find your file you can click on it and open it, or run it just like if it was in an Explorer windows.

Everything is not a system hog, it uses very little system resources.  Those million files and folders will take up 45Mb of memory, and 5Mb of disk space. 20,000 files uses about 3-5Mb of memory, and 1 Mb of disk space. With today’s memory being in the Gigabyte range this is a walk in the park.

I placed the program permanently on my Start menu by right clicking on the program and selecting “pin to start menu,” so its always on top. Any time I need to search for anything, I go “Start->Search Everything,” and I’m off and running.

I left out the best part of this program. It’s absolutely free. The author asks for a donation if you like the program. So give it a try, and enjoy!

I had to admit, I was in the habit of not looking things up in texts, and just trying to find the answer to my one problem on the Internet. It usually works. I don’t know if you want to call this being lazy, or being efficient, maybe a little of both.

This led to electronic books and readers now available on line that can answer your problem and at the same time go beyond and give you the background information for future problem solving. We both agreed that we don’t like reading books on line and prefer a text in our hands. There’s something about the smell and feel of books in your hand that makes you treasure them, and enjoy the read.

The Kindle Reader for the Windows PC

Following our discussion, I downloaded the “new” free Amazon Kindle reader for the PC, and a free Kindle book from Amazon to check out the reader. This is currently just a Window’s application, and it is in “beta” which means there are some bugs. They ask you to put in your Amazon account id and password which automatically links the reader to your account. Now with one click of the mouse you can buy a Kindle book and download it to your PC reader.

There’s not a lot of free Kindle books available, but enough to check out the reader. You can find them on Amazon by searching for Kindle books, and a list of books are returned. A “Sort By” box will appear in the upper right side of the search results window, click on it, and sort by “Price low to high.” All the free books rise to the top of the pile. Sherlock Holmes it was. And the purchase at $0.00 was completed. Amazon’s hope is you’ll build up a PC library, and then buy a $259 Kindle so you can take it with you.

They did a nice job with the software, and the reader is nice. You can change font size and page width easily, to make it universally acceptable for all eyesight, and it keeps track of what page you are on in the read. You move pages by the arrow keys or scrolling and can jump via bookmarks and a table of contents.

Since I had loaded it at work and it seemed to work fine, I decided to try it at home and in the end unloaded it. I do not believe they have their syncs worked out yet, and maybe had problems with my loading it down twice.

One thing I did notice is that the books I “purchased” were kept at Amazon.  I had to share in my purchase in my account on Amazon, and then sync to ereader to read it.   A pain at best that does not work properly. If I understand this correctly, when I put down my money, I get a copy of the book for as long as I remain sync’d with Amazon, although this is done automatically by the software, a piece of me wants it both ways. Keep a record on Amazon, but also give me a copy on my computer or computers for instant set up and access.

The Kindle reader looks nice, but its not quite ready for prime time yet, and is still a beta. I think e-readers and by default PC readers will come into their own, but their still working out the kinks and are not quite ready for prime time.

Recently I had a problem with Google. I typed in my query into the Google window, hit the search button, and nothing happen, no search results. Hmmm…what’s going on?

Let me digress for a moment to a pet peeve of mind. People who make software programs are human and want to make money just like the next guy. A way that software distributors make extra money is to load someone elses companion program along with their application. This companion program is usually made to be unobtrusive, not easily noticed, and usually is implemented in the form of a toolbar in your browser’s upper window. The “Ask toolbar” is probably the biggest culprit of this technique at the moment.

Normally when you load a utility program, during the installation, they give you a check box to uncheck, if you don’t want the toolbar loaded, but sometimes they just load it. Well behaved toolbars that suddenly pop up in your browser, usually can be turned off by right clicking on the toolbar, and turning off the toolbar you don’t want.

Back to the problem. Microsoft with their new Bing Search engine is desperate, and I do mean desperate, to gain market share in the search engine wars. They’ve decided to go the way of the “Ask toolbar” and load their toolbar into your browser when you load utility programs. This toolbar loads without an option not to load, and it puts their Bing search box prevalently in the upper left window, where you go for the “back” button.

Most folks, will not initially notice it, but if they do, and want to turn it off, a right click in the toolbar will not find the Microsoft Bing toolbar in the list of toolbars, not nice.

When a Google search does not return search results, I could see an unsuspecting user going right up to the Bing search bar, and doing their search from there, just what Microsoft wants.

Knowing and loving Microsoft the way I do, and seeing the Bing search box on my toolbar, I immediately suspected that there was some foul play going on here. I decided to get rid of the Bing toolbar. It turns out the only way to do that was to go to “Add Remove Programs” in the Control Panel. Once I removed the Microsoft Bing toolbar, and restarted my browser, the Google search results miraculously returned.

Now I’m not saying that Microsoft would make a toolbar that would interfere with the operation of a competitor’s program. I know Microsoft would never do that intentionally. They might change the format of Word documents with every release to make competitors trying to open their documents not be able to do that without a lot of work. Nor would I ever accuse Microsoft of intentionally slowing your computer down with every security update, so you would think your computer was getting old and slow, and go buy a new computer and operating system. I’m sure Microsoft only has benevolent intentions.

No, I’m just writing this post to let you know how to fix the problem if you find that Google will not give you search results, and you happen to have a Bing search box in your browser toolbar.

There are so many text editors out there its very difficult to select an editor, simply because of the time it takes to evaluate them all.  Over the years, I have gone from editor to editor, as a new editor comes out and catches my attention. There is not one text editor that meets all my needs.  I find myself using several text editors depending on what I am doing.

DarkRoom

For the writing of formal documents that I use to communicate with others, I use a word processor, either Microsoft Word, or OpenOffice.org Writer. Lately, I have been using OpenOffice Writer.

For doing web development with PHP and MySQL, I use a full fledged IDE that has many coding utilities integrated into a development environment. I have tried, NetBeans, Aptana, Eclispe, and the one I currently use is Zend Studio.

For writing web pages, quickly, I do not need all the functionality offered by IDE’s. I need an “IDE Lite”, so to speak.   I look for a text editor that has some HTML and CSS code snippets built-in that I can quickly drop into my web page.  They usually have a file viewer.   I have tried PSPad, Notepad++, HTML Kit, Intype, and BlueFish.  I keep going back to HTML Kit, even though it takes some time to configure, just because it is so flexible and configurable.  I can make it into exactly what I want with an IDE Lite editor.

I have one editor I use to write either a blog article, a small program, or a note.  A “simple” text editor, an example would be Microsoft Notepad.  A “simple” text editor has the following characteristics: it loads extremely fast.  I click the icon, blink, and I’m ready to type.  It doesn’t have a lot of other functionality like code snippets, or file viewer, but it has a little more functionality than Notepad.  Alright, I’ll get right to it.

One of my major pet peeves with editors is color configuration.  I like a dark background, specifically #000066, which is a dark blue, with lime foreground text.  When you look at a monitor 8 to 12 hours a day, you get tired of staring at white background screens. It starts glaring at the eyes. I want to be able to have the colors the way I want them in my editor, and there lies the problems I have with editors.

With all the editors I use, you can configure the screen colors, except there’s always a catch.  It’s not easily done in the word processors, you have a huge amount of screen real estate taken up by menus, which you can not easily adjust or make disappear.  With IDE’s and the IDE Lites, you run into trouble changing colors, because of language color syntax highlighting, and you end up playing with the color configuration until you get all the different syntax highlighting visible on the screen without any disappearance due to the dark background.  You also seem to be constantly fiddling with the colors with the IDE’s.  I have found I have had to keep my color preferences in a separate notebook to quickly set up a new editor.  Long story short, I want a dark background that will not mess up the rest of the editor functionality. Note: to all you editor makers out there, I would like a dark default configuration, especially for you IDE folks, that I can change with one click.

Back to “simple” editors, Notepad does not allow you to change colors. The simple text editor I currently am using to write this article fits the bill nicely, and I must admit prompted this entire review.

It’s called “DarkRoom.”  I like DarkRoom a lot. It is a full screen editor, i.e. nothing shows on the screen except the editor window, no menus. It’s meant to have a dark background for those of us that write a lot.

DarkRoom is Windows based freeware that credits Mac based WriteRoom, as its inspiration.  DarkRoom has spawned a bunch of look-a-likes: Q10, JDarkRoom, PyRoom, WestEdit, and online editors, like Dark Copy, and Online Appwriter, but none of these do it as good as DarkRoom.

DarkRoom allows some basic configuration, like font, font-size, colors, and the look of the editor on start up, and that’s about it. And quite frankly that’s all I want. It opens in a flash from an icon on my desktop, and allows me to write full screen, if I press Esc or F11, a menu comes up that allows me to save, cut, and paste, some statistics, and search and replace. I don’t need to use the menu, because DarkRoom follows all the standard Windows keyboard conventions, like Ctrl-S saves the document.

I highly recommend you take a test drive of DarkRoom. It is an extremely good text writing editor, the kind of editor you would use to write a blog, sort of like this one.

With this new release 10.50, Opera has introduced a new JavaScript engine, actually three new engines combined, that together, increase the speed of the browser up to seven times faster than the previous version, which was already fast.  Opera Software claims Opera 10.50 is the “Fastest Browser on Earth.”  It is.  Couple that with a perfect score of 100 on the ACID3 test, and you have a state-of-the art, W3C web compliant, lightning fast, web browser, and there’s so much more.

Opera has joined Cloud Computing in using additional servers on the Internet to enhance your browsing experience in three ways that currently no other browser supports. First, we have Opera Turbo.  Opera Turbo can be used by people with slower Internet connections.  Opera turbo compresses the web page on the server to up to 80% of its original size to speed your download speed.  This will improve your browsing speed on some of the slower wifi connections in retail coffee houses also.

Second, we have Opera Unite. Opera Unite allows you to share music, videos and documents with friends without having to either email the content to them, or uploading the content to a server.  It sets up a virtual server between your friends over the Internet. This means larger content files like movies can be shared with your friends easily.

And finally, we have Opera Link.   For those familiar with Delicious, a web service that allows you to centralize all your bookmarks and put them on the Internet, Opera goes one step further.  You set up your Link account in each of your computer browsers.  From then on Opera Link can keep your Bookmarks, Browser configuration, history, Speed Dial, Notes, and Searches synchronized with all the rest of your Opera browsers automatically.  If you set a new bookmark in your browser at work, it will automatically show up on your home browser.

That brings up Speed Dial, which shows you images of your favorite web pages you can click on when you open a new browser window.  Unique to Opera is Visual Tabs, pull down the menu tab bar and an image of the web pages in your tabs are shown.  For those small fonts on the web page, and for readers who can’t see the page, there is a Page Zoom icon to quickly zoom in to the web page with a simple click of the Page Zoom icon on the bottom right toolbar, that’s nice.   With Notes, you can select some text on a web page, right click, and save it to Notes.  This automatically saves the text and the web URL, for reference later.  And it’s not limited to one note, like Microsoft’s copy and paste.

Then we have faster browsing with a series of enhancements.  Mouse Gestures allow you to customize your mouse movement. To give you an example, right click on your mouse, and move your mouse to the left, and you’ll go back to your previous web page, no more having to place your mouse on the “Back” icon at the top of the browser to go back one page. There’s Fast Forward to go to the next page, like the back button, this one guesses what your next page would be, and takes you to it.  No more going to the bottom of the Google page to find the next page number.  And there’s a fast back to take you to the original page of your search.  Opera will fill out the user name and password for a particular web page automatically if you like with their Password Manager.

You need a Dictionary, an Encyclopedia, or to Translate a word into another language, select the word, and right click, and select what you want to do.

If you close some of the tabs you had open and closed the wrong one by mistake, no problem, there’ a Trash can icon that keeps track of tabs you closed. You can also browse History Free if you prefer.

Have you ever wanted to find a particular word on a web page full of text. One way you could do this is with Alt-F then type in the word, Opera makes this a little easier with Find in page,  just type a period with your word, and it is highlighted on the screen.

Windows7 and Vista introduced Widgets for little applications you wanted on your desktop. There’s Opera Widgets that do the same thing in your browser window.

And now to features that I really like.   Google’s Chrome originally allowed you to type your search into the address bar.  They were the first, then Firefox followed, Opera has done them one better with a Quick Search.  You can type your search into the address bar, like with the other browsers, and in Opera you can assign a one letter url for the address bar.  Let me give you a couple of examples.  I want to search for a JavaScript book on Amazon, type “z javascript” in the address bar and you’ll go to Amazon books and the JavaScript books page pops up.  You can type “w php” and bring up the Wiki for php, or “e ipods” and bring up Ebay on the ipod page.   What’s nice is you can create your own custom key shortcuts also.   If you go to Amazon a lot this really simplifies getting to where you want to be.

And finally, Opera is starting to listen. I have said many times before that if Opera would put out some decent web development tools, I would give up Firefox for web development and use Opera full time.  With this release the Alpha of Opera Dragonfly is being released.  This will be a full-featured development environment allowing you to debug JavaScript, inspect the DOM, the CSS, network traffic and data stores with built-in remote debugging for mobile devices.  To view page source, go to page->Developer’s Tools->source, or validate, or Inspect Element. You can Inspect the element on the page with a right click of the mouse.   This is an Alpha version, some of the choices are not functional yet,  as to be expected with an Alpha release, like the color picker, but Operation Dragonfly, the equivalent to Firebug on Firefox, looks like it has the potential to out do Firebug in functionality once everything gets hooked up.

Opera, now that you are finally moving to be a full fledged web development tools, let me help you.   Things I missed in Opera Dragonfly for Web Development, that I want.  The F12 key to bring up the application, and put it back down, quickly.  The Inspect button in Firebug that allows you to search the screen for an element with your mouse.   Yes, Dragonfly does it with the right click, Inspect Element, but its not the same, or it’s not fully functional yet.  I’d like an Aardvark plug-in type of functionality where I don’t have to bring up Dragonfly to view the DOM element.  I want to see all the CSS affecting the page with file names, like Web Developer, View CSS, in fact the entire Firefox Web Developer plug-in would be nice.

Keep working!  Your doing great work. Your web development tools aren’t quite there yet, but I see you’re actively working on them, as you get closer and closer, you may win me over for Web Development, you already have for general web browsing.  For those who have not tried Opera, I recommend you try it out, you might like it.