dangerouslyawesome

I'm Alex Hillman, the co-founder of IndyHall and a guy who makes things better in Sunny Philadelphia.

I work on Beanstalk, Postmark, and DynamicWear.

I think technology is cool, but people are infinitely cooler.

and the fickle crowd turns

it looks like the phill ryu fanfare has fizzled over the weekend to the tune of “wah wah”.

ive been impressed by the quality content Phill has present on his blog for the last few weeks. Dugg blog posts were nearly a daily occurance. For the first time since his fanbase has grown, he posted his opinion about a UI product called amora. and the crowd seems to disagree in a big way. whats this going to do for phill’s fanbase? are his 15 minutes over? i hope not, because he’s written some excellent features in the last couple of weeks and hopefully wont be discouraged.

say yes no to bloxpress.

bloxpress is an ajax-driven wordpress template system. I’m playing with it more for the “disassemble and play with it in the background” factor, so if i something doesnt act like you think it should, it might be my fault so let me know.

I think i like it….do you?

After noticing my google analytics bottom out for the last day and a half, it dawned on me, that the ajaxification broke my tracker. is it fixable? sure. But lord knows what else it might break in the mean time. I’d like to keep this blogs operation a priority, and so, the “features” of bloxpress will have to be done without for now.

i am trying on another similar color-themed skin. Some said that the stripey theme from before was distracting. thoughts on this one?

products dont kill people, people kill people.

verdict: on windows, aptana is slow and clunky. shame, too, because my comparably spec’d core duo iMac runs it nearly flawlessly…and it provided the most efficient javascript development experience I’ve ever had. A task that I was dreading for a week and a half was…well..to quote chris pirillo “more less sucky”.

The real reason for my commentary today has to do with alot of people who are commenting and digging aptana, which i think is great for the product promotion. over 2000 diggs at the moment for an article claiming that aptana is a “Dreamweaver killer“. I dont want to get started on my “anti product-killer” rant right now, but the fact of the matter is that this product wont ever kill dreamweaver for the same reason microsofts zune isn’t going to kill the ipod. community. products that are built around a community of users are practically impossible to kill because you not only have to offer a better product, but an incentive to leave all of your friends and make new friends. I dont know about you, but that doesnt sound like something I’m interested in doing any time soon.

visual studio is a bastard…but can be beaten into submission

For the last few months, developing at home has been a joy since switching to mac and using textmate (and now, aptana is added to my arsenal). At work, however, I’m still stuck in visual studio since we are primarily an asp.net shop. I’ve worked in visual studio 2005, and I have to say, its a much more pleasant development experience….intellisense is smarter, code doesnt get destroyed by design view, and doctype-aware intellisense is the best thing, ever. But we havent switched to .net 2.0 yet…so i’m stuck in the hellhole that is VS2k3. I could spend pages whining about the idiosyncracies that drive me absolutely mad, but today isnt about that. today is about how to make this IDE workable. Last night, right before leaving work, my html intellisense crapped out…but only in one project (the one I’m spending the most time in now, of course). While looking for a fix (which didnt exist…or if it did, VS decided to fix itself before i found one), i found a couple of neato tools that I think will prove useful moving forward.

Before moving forward, i should point out that a couple of these items came from an msdn article. I havent tried all of these, but just because I dont talk about it here doesnt mean it isn’t worth checking out.

First, CodeKeep, is similar to a dozen or so other code-repository sites…what this one has that I havent seen yet is direct integration into Visual Studio…2003 and 2005. Their repository contains 7137 Registered users, 5229 Total snippets, and 1798 Public snippets. Thats alot of stuff, and it’s all organized pretty darn well. Oh, and searchable.

Next, and I see this useful for making code-related posts here. CopySourceAsHTML allows you to copy source from the IDE window, and paste it into another text editor with html wrappers so that when in an html-compatable viewer, it is formatted just like it appeared in your IDE. I have a plugin doing this in wordpress, but it doesnt do it very well…hopefully, this will work a bit better.

My last, and probably most important item, is ReSharper. If you arent using this yet…get it. You’ll thank me later. This tool takes intellisense to the next level, and allows for easy and thorough refactoring of code. I really can’t say enough about this product so download the trial, take it for a spin, and you’ll see what i’m talking about. One annoyance about this product has to do with it’s weird caching practices…loading up a project with resharper installed does take noticably longer than without it…but again, i promise, the benefits are worth it.

Thats it for my Visual Studio power tool session…if you have something you can’t live without in your IDE, let me know, maybe I’ve seen a tool to pull it off. And if you know of any super-useful tools, I’d love to hear from you too.

calling all freelancers

the next 6 months have the potential for a lot of work to cross my keyboard…most of it, out of the scope of things that I can do on my own. I’m looking to team up with sharp, creative, driven individuals who are experienced but also are interested in learning new things. Designers shouldnt hesitate to contact me, though, most of the work is technology oriented. Skills needed include:

• valid xhtml
• css (tableless layouts
• javascript
• ajax
• php
• asp.net
• actionscript
• jsp
• really…anything tech. cant hurt to try, and I’m always looking for smart folks to work with.

have any of the above in your portfolio? send resume/links/a friendly message my way. use my handy contact form.