Oh My! The Wait For Dolphin 6 Was Worth It!

I finally got around to using Dolphin 6 this weekend. I upgraded my projects in no time. I had a few problems but, they were because I called private methods without realizing it (the gods of encapsulation spoke and smited me). Truth be told, my tests found all of the problems except one. Nice.

Enough about my projects, "How is it?" you ask! Let me tell you it is a gorgeous front-end. The text editor also jumps up at you. The auto-completion is extremely accurate and helpful. I never thought I could be more productive in Smalltalk, but the guys at Object-Arts have proven me wrong. The second thing that you notice is the graphical layout tool. It is improved greatly! It now gives you examples to look at and it's simply easier to work with. I love it! You'd think they would stop there, right? Nope, they also added version control (which I was using in Dolphin 5) which works a lot like Envy.

But, wait there's more! Not only do you get all of those things, you also get this thing called "Idea Space". Basically, it's like a tabbed web browser (ala FireFox and Opera) for coding. It took a little while to get used to, but the boys used to programming in Eclipse are going to love it!

All in all, Dolphin 6 is even more fun to program than Dolphin 5. Other Smalltalk vendors should take note. The UI is awesome with lots of bells and whistles that aid you in producing and examining code. I did find some bugs, but apparently they've already been fixed. Overall, a solid product that was worth the wait. I can't wait to explore the changes in the object libraries. Treasure awaits!