Technical Communication & Information Design
The open source Web development environment formerly known as the Aptana IDE has been re-christened as “Aptana Studio” and released as Version 1.0.
As of v1.0, the Eclipse-based product has been split into two different “editions”. The Community Edition remains free, and a new Professional Edition has been introduced for commercial use with “priority” support and a few extra features such as FTPS and SFTP.
For details on the new release, see the Aptana blog.
If you use the Enable Mac OS keyboard shortcuts option in VMware Fusion, Mac keyboard commands are passed on to the VM, which is useful if your Mac-schooled muscle memory has you pressing Apple+S every time you breathe.
The Enable Mac OS mouse shortcuts also affects the CTRL key, which is used in Windows for nonadjacent selection & a few other handy things.
With the latter option active, VMware interprets the a CTRL-click like a Mac would, invoking the context shortcut menu instead of extending the current selection, which can be absolutely vexing if you’re trying to select a bunch of individual files in a folder or open a Firefox link in a new tab.
While you can easily disable the option entirely, there is an alternative if you’ve grown accustomed to command-clicking to emulate a middle-click and want access to these mouse shortcuts in your VM:
To have it both ways, just use the Enter key to the right of the space bar instead! When you press this key and click the mouse, VMware passes this on to Windows as a CTRL-click.
Say “Hello” to SCPlugin — At long last, there’s a Mac equivalent for TortoiseSVN: a free, open-source Subversion client for Mac OS X that integrates with the Finder to display the status of your version-controlled files in the Finder without the need for a separate application.
While dedicated Subversion clients can be useful at times, for most day-to-day work it’s much easier to check in or out via a context menu command without having to fire up a different program (though Versions is definitely one to watch).
Like in TortoiseSVN or Tortoise CVS, icon overlays badges show at a glance the Subversion status of each file in a window.
A new version of the Aptana Web IDE is now available with PHP support that includes Code Assist on PHP functions and parameters, improved PHP syntax colorization, and a PHP outliner. The JavaScript outliner and Ajax libraries have also been updated.
Details on changes are available in the Release Notes.
Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium Publishing has published her first impressions of FrameMaker 8, including a charming and mildly disturbing delineation of the significance of the new icon. 
The review also includes a link to her FrameMaker Developer Center article on the new complex conditional processing features, an extremely helpful explanation of how to use the new Boolean logic with conditional text and combinations of attribute values in structured FrameMaker to support what she calls “extreme versioning.”
Installation Surprise #2: Another thing about the new FrameMaker 8 that Adobe hasn’t mentioned is immediately apparent after installation—the program now has a tabbed interface and the toolbar has received a colorful (if somewhat half-hearted) makeover.
FrameMaker users have been complaining for years about the antiquated interface, and while a tab bar and a few garish icons certainly aren’t anything to brag about, it is nice to see that someone has been listening to the lists.
Installation Surprise #1: One of the new FrameMaker 8 “features” Adobe carefully neglects to mention is that the application now requires activation—like most of their other products nowadays.
As usual, the program will run for 30 days without activation, but thereafter you’ll need to run the activation procedure and hope they got it right this time.
In the past, there have been a number of issues with these proprietary activation schemes that do little to deter skilled pirates and often prove annoying for paying customers that have the nerve to upgrade machines, use drive imaging software, or just generally resent being treated like criminals…
For those who find Eclipse a bit intimidating to install, configure and maintain (or just appreciate a simpler approach), there’s now an easier way—EasyEclipse bills itself as ” …easy to download and install, and simple to maintain, without version and dependency issues”.
By packaging together Eclipse, the open-source software development platform, and selected open source plugins, EasyEclipse strives to improve the way Eclipse is distributed by doing away with the many of the annoyances associated with setting up the IDE, such as “large downloads with many components or plugins you don’t need, too many similar plugins to choose from, version incompatibility between plugins and the Eclipse platform or other plugins…”
Adobe has announced that they have completed selection of around 300 volunteers for the FrameMaker 8 Prerelease Beta 2 Testing Program and will not be accepting any more participants.
So while that may sound like bad news if you weren’t fortunate enough to be selected, it’s certainly good news in the sense that FrameMaker 8 is indeed making progress towards release…
A new version of the Aptana IDE is available with a new colorization engine, Eclipse Monkey support and “tons of enhancements”.
One very special treat supported by the new build (#15637) is an iPhone Development Plugin that adds preview support for iPhone applications, so you can see how your app will look on the iPhone.
So while it’s not exactly the SDK so many were expecting June 11, it might prove useful nonetheless—and I promise, that’s all I have to say about the iPhone today—honest! 