Here at demoMedia, every developer has (within reason) the freedom to develop and manage their work as they chose.

Once the code has been checked out from our version control server the development environment is at the individual developer’s behest.  For a while now I’ve been using a tool called Intype, which styles itself as the “The text editor we’ve all been waiting for” which is apt, because I’ve been waiting for the thing to be finished and stable for almost two years, now.  While I like the customisable formatting for various scripting languages, it’s been in an officially ‘unstable’ state for as long as I’ve been using it.  One of the biggest problems is the way that, every morning, it takes a good ten minutes to scan all my projects on my machine before it’s ready to be actually used.

The search for the perfect web development environment is constant and I’m always looking for something new and interesting, and ShiftEdit has recently caught my eye.  This is a text editor that buys in to the increasing trend for in-browser apps (something Google is desperate for people to get on board with, as it’s the entire basis for their new ChromeBook laptops that can run the Chrome web browser and not much else).  It allows you to sign in to the app and manage all your projects and start your development straight from the browser.  For someone who, like me, allows Google to run his entire life and has each instance of Chrome synced to his account, this instant access to one development environment is a very attractive prospect.

I’m not the biggest fan of the move from natively running apps and storing your files to having everything kept in the vaguely sinister ‘cloud’ but I can’t deny the usefulness of allowing Google (or similar service) to manage and serve you your entire life at a click of a button.

If ShiftEdit proves useful, it might be time to suggest making it a standard for the office, especially if it could solve the problem of not having your normal development available when working from home or responding to emergencies at 3am.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Intype appears to have crashed again.