This would give IDEA more marketing appeal

I don't use it personally, but I think hardcore Ruby/RoR support in IDEA has the potential to bring a sizable group of new users.

The price, again the price. I don't ask to make IDEA free but it will be better if IDEA is cheaper.

Cheaper + more good features + good performance == more marketing appeal

(Sorry if I make you feel sick)

I disagree. When you are comparing yourself to free, anything more than free is always going to be considered to be the loser. If you can't compete against their strength (cost), then compete against their weakness (usability).

Personally, the price is so low that it is practically free. If a shop can't spend $500 for an editor that I will use for a gazillion hours a year, then they probably can't afford my salary in the first place.

Wizards. Most of the vocal IJ community is against wizards, but the perspective customers are used to having them. I over heard one of our developers fuming yesterday about how hard it was to create a bean. He wanted some place where he could type the name, click set/get and be done with it.

And I would have to disagree with you. I work almost exclusively at Fortune 500 companies and their purchasing processes are difficult, long and arcane.

They have various levels of approval that depend on each company but, in general, if you're in the $250 range you're considered petty expenses and get accelerated purchasing (or even the ability to purchase at all). If you're above that you usually get more oversight, have to create a justification document, cost/benefit document, etc.

Ironically, it's often easier to purchase a $50,000 piece of software then a $500 one since these companies have purchasing agreements in place with Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, etc.

And once you're in the $250 range you open up the possibility for individuals to purchase the software when their companies won't.

Purchasing a personal license is already 249$, and upgrading is 149$ :)

http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/personal.html

I indeed bought my own license as my company won't buy anything other than IBM RAD

how about "new class", create your fields and intention add getters/setters ?
i personally find it much easier !

And what I hate in wizards is they're usually modal, they should be kept for really complex tasks, not simple ones

Wizards.

AFAIK there was a wizard plug-in that allowed the definition of custom wizards.

Wouldn't that be a solution?
This way, advanced users would not be annoyed by the wizards.

Ahmed.

As I understand, it only applies for individual, not for company. Assume that my company wants to buy 5 licenses, we can have a discount, but I don't think we can buy with 249$/license.

As I understand, it only applies for individual, not for company.
Assume that my company wants to buy 5 licenses, we can have a discount,
but I don't think we can buy with 249$/license.

It is for individuals, but one can use it for commercial purposes too.
So AFAIK the company can buy 5 licenses in the name of each person, so the licenses won't be "nameless".

Of course, if one person leaves the company, would take the license too (one more reason
for companies not to fire it's workers :) ).

Ahmed.

On 2007-03-01 20:11:09 +0300, Ahmed Mohombe <amohombe@yahoo.com> said:

>> As I understand, it only applies for individual, not for company.
>> Assume that my company wants to buy 5 licenses, we can have a discount,
>> but I don't think we can buy with 249$/license.

It is for individuals, but one can use it for commercial purposes too.
So AFAIK the company can buy 5 licenses in the name of each person, so
the licenses won't be "nameless".

Of course, if one person leaves the company, would take the license too
(one more reason
for companies not to fire it's workers :) ).

Ahmed.

The limitation is actually is expenses for the license must be covered
from personal funds, not the company ones.

>>> As I understand, it only applies for individual, not for company.
>>> Assume that my company wants to buy 5 licenses, we can have a
>>> discount, but I don't think we can buy with 249$/license.
>> It is for individuals, but one can use it for commercial purposes too.
>> So AFAIK the company can buy 5 licenses in the name of each person, so
>> the licenses won't be "nameless".
>>
>> Of course, if one person leaves the company, would take the license
>> too (one more reason
>> for companies not to fire it's workers :) ).
>>
>> Ahmed.

The limitation is actually is expenses for the license must be covered
from personal funds, not the company ones.

My error :).
I thought it doesn't matter who's credit card is used as long as your name (and not the company's)
is in the license :).

Ahmed.

>Price

Typically you get what you pay for. IDEA is a great value. (Adding Ruby support would make it greater! - Python would be nice too : >)

If you are a professional and you aren't willing to pay for good tools, well, there you go.

GROOVY SUPPORT!!! I want a better groovy plugin in Intellij so bad I can taste it. I haven't bought a personal license since 3.0 relying on eaps and company licenses when I could get them but I would go buy one TODAY if they announced support for Groovy and Grails.

Cost is an issue but I will always use intellij if they have a better product period. My time is more valuable than the cost of the license.

Actually, I wonder if intellij ought to embrace the open source community itself to help out with this functionality. The Groovy plugin is a great example. Right now many of the big names behind groovy are using IDEA. The author of the plugin has done tremendous work so far but it still needs a great deal more work. Intellij could lend some help to the creator of the plugin in terms of evaluating his code and architecture and making suggestions or even make contributions to the code itself. In addition, as this plugin absolutely would promote usage of intellij among groovy programmers, Intellij could offer "Plugin rewards" where plugin creators who donate their hard effort to increase the functionality of intellij would be rewarded with a few hundred bucks or even a few thousand. In the end Intellij gains additional users, sells more licenses, gains market share, etc.

Just a thought....

.... just like MPS started, but not yet succeeded.

First, I should say that I think IDEA is already on the right track, as far as development directions to improve marketing. That said, here's a couple that I think could really be strong, from a marketing perspective:

1)Support for remote dependencies, leveraging the various Maven/Ivy repositories out there. It should be possible to type "HibernateSession" as a class name, and have IDEA offer to search repositories for such a class, link to it, download it to a local cache, link and download any of it's dependencies (recursively), and automatically bind in sources and javadoc with one click .

2)Web services support, with a bunch of flavors supported.

3)Stronger and more flexible dependency analysis, including diagramming and off-line analysis.

--Dave Griffith

That could work. However, a plugin is not what I would recommend. It needs to be something supported by IJ, not by some hidden developer tapping away on his creaky keyboard.

Plus, if it's a plugin that you have to find, you fall into the Eclipse trap. There are a gazillion plugins for anything you want, but you have to wade through them and waste your time finding which one works.

Adobe Flex/Apollo support.

1) Fantastic idea
2) This is sorely needed. If you use IJ, you are pretty much reduced to coding WS by hand. Not fun.

+1

That could work. However, a plugin is not what I would recommend.

Almost everything is a plug-in in Selena (even the J2EE functionality).
If it's delivered with IntelliJ, new users won't note a thing and advanced users
can uninstall it anytime.

Ahmed.

Ant debugger ! So many people struggle with their builds today - very few of them actually understand (or even like) Ant. If IDEA could provide them with powerful Ant debugger where one could breakpoint at every point and examine his properties and the like - this would be a killer feature, of course.

P.S
Now, I've heard Eclipse has one - is that true ? How does it work ?

then you are probably like to check this link: http://www.jetbrains.net/jira/browse/IDEADEV-14365 :)

1) I suppose for many people this would sound as nice idea. May be. Anyway, is it just me that I really like to download everything by myself, organize it nicely in some local repository (be it SCM or not) and configure IDEA ? Instead of relying on some external repository and IDEA downloading things for me. It's not a question about IDEA of course - it's just the idea of global Maven repositories still doesn't appeal for me. I mean, how difficult it is to download the third-party library your project relies on ? Sure, if it has 50 of them and out of sudden one needs to download all 50 - there's a problem. But I liked dealing with those things and wouldn't be glad if IDEA will start being a Word-like "smart ass", doing things nobody has asked for.
So if this idea would be implemented - please, make it optional ! Out there, there are still those dealing with third-parties in an old-fashioned way and actually enjoying the process, you know :)

Word-like auto-correction ?

For example, I frequently start typing "i- CtrlSpace .. " instead of "i_ CtrlSpace .. " (apparently, not pressing Shift hard enough or not pressing it at all) and then IDEA completes some weird forms like "i-toString()" instead of "i_token" that I was thinking of when typed "t" after Ctrl+Space.

So for me, for example, auto-correction of "[mi]-" to "[mi]_" (meaning "m-", "i-" => "m_", "i_") would be really useful.

Talking about debugger - many times people have absolutely no idea where some Ant target is coming from (as we're not using Ant namespaces, which is a different story) so if debugger could point exactly the origin of (be it macrodef defined somewhere and ]]>-ed through lot's of imports or Ant-Contrib/some custom task) - that would be reaaaaly helpful to those people who are not familiar "by heart" with their builds.

As mentioned here on the thread already, Groovy support.

I understand the marketing spin behind the RoR support. But in an attempt to bring in new flocks of happy users, don't drive away the existing ones. At the moment, I feel abandoned with all the hype around RoR plugin while ignoring the fact the Groovy would rather be used by a Java shop than Ruby.

After all, JavaScript support has been introduced already, and it's decent. Throw resources both at RoR and Groovy support, though I understand it's easy to say...

I don't know what would give IDEA more marketing appeal. What people who use Eclipse seem to want, for example, is frequently very different to what I want (lots of plugins for obscure functionality).

I can talk about what would make it easier for me to feel confident selling IDEA to my friends and co-workers. I'd like the basic features to work, and work reliably. I'm still using 6.0.4, I've always used the EAP versions (since the v5 EAP) but now I'm afraid to do so. I've had various problems with basic functionality:

http://intellij.net/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=265997&tstart=0
http://intellij.net/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=265794&tstart=50

And especially:

http://intellij.net/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=265510&tstart=50
http://intellij.net/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=265442&tstart=100

I work in a small shop of serious developers, when we started up 9 months or so ago I convinced the others that we should be using IntelliJ. It's now a company standard. I've been the biggest fanboy of IntelliJ you can imagine since I discovered it 3 years or so ago, I've probably pretty much personally sold 10 licenses through recommendations. But the Ant and SVN problems detailed above make my life hell on a daily basis. I'm still occasionally delighted by IntelliJ, but recently I've had such extreme problems with basic functionality that today, for the first time ever, I recommended to a friend who is new to Java that he use Eclipse. Ironically, today was also the day that one of my co-workers commented to me that using IntelliJ had caused him to lose faith in parts of the IDE that you should never lose faith in, principally version control. Everyone in our project, whenever they update from SVN, has to do the resolve conflict/project status/manually resolve conflict/rebuild everything dance to make sure it's all ok. It's ridiculous. Of course, we wouldn't get so many conflicts if it wasn't for the stupid project file reorganisation problem.

I'm also disappointed at the total lack of Jetbrains response to messages in the Community forum. Maybe I'm just spoiled by the personal service we get here in EAP, but I can't post my problems here, they're not EAP problems.

I used to absolutely love IntelliJ. Seriously. It made me happy and amazed on a daily basis in a way that almost no piece of software had previously. It's now become one of the programs I put up with, like all the others. I would dearly love to be able to go back to loving it again. I don't care about JSF. I don't care about Javascript or Groovy or Ruby (well, maybe a little). I don't care about EJB or Spring or Hibernate or any of that. I'd just like Ant and SVN to work, please, and I'd like someone to tell me it's going to happen in v6.

+1

I agree that making the things that we do dozens of times a day are far more important than hibernate/spring/struts/whatever support.

Despite my rant below about not adding new features until old ones work properly, an Ant debugger would rock my world. Both Eclipse and Netbeans have them:

http://ant.netbeans.org/debugger.html

http://www.eclipsezone.com/eclipse/forums/t71656.html