Bespin

2009-11-07

This came up in the final talk of Dion and Ben. They talked about Bespin, an RIA editor, which looked really interesting.

So I've loaded that up in Chrome. First thing you might notice is that there are a few cursor hints (when the cursor changes to a hand) on the frontpage that were unclickable in any way. Kinda weird, but ok. After registration the editor opened and .. nothing happened. So I checked, and it seemed I hadn't updated my Chrome in ages, and so I went and did that. After that the editor finally loaded and I got started. Sort of.

I wanted to load an example library of my own in it to see how it would handle syntax highlighting. Only problem was, I couldn't paste. It just wouldn't paste. Turns out, that's broken in Chrome. Meh? Ok, no biggie, I'll load up Firefox 3.6a (Namoroka) and continue from there.

First things you notice is the rather slow loading times. Stuff takes time, and as they explained themselves at the conference, long loading times without any notification of what's going on is bad for user experience. Oh and I have a fast computer... But downloading stuff takes time and I wanted to see this, so whatever.

So I wanted to see syntax highlighting. I'm not one to rtfm as my first option so I searched the GUI for some hint of doing turning it on. There wasn't any. I figured I may had to save my file in a different way, extension sniffing ftw. Even that seemed impossible. The first rightclick in the application crashed it. And when I looked at the error log, I had about 10 different errors in it.

For me, that was Exit Bespin. I do believe an RIA can at some point replace a desktop application for IDE's, but Bespin isn't quite ready for that at the time.