I just installed Editor 6 to give it a try...
My Experience
It installed with no problem and I opened an existing 28X1 program I wrote a bit ago. When I tried to check the syntax, a dialogue popped up to say that the #picaxe directive did not match the environment setting that seemed to have defaulted to 20M2. I attempted to dismiss the dialogue but the OK button on it did nothing. Eventually I had to kill the program with the Task Manager. I restarted and tried to change the environment setting from 20M2 to 28X1 but after changing the setting in the left hand panel, the program locked up and I had to kill it with the Task Manager again. I restarted and tried again and the same thing happened (3 times). So given that I don't have any 20M2 projects, I'm stuck and have uninstalled the software.
Some Observations
Version 6 seems to be quite heavy weight compared with the 5.4.3 I am currently using. Version 5.4.3 loads from scratch in less than 2 seconds. Version 6 was taking over 15 seconds on the same machine (dual core 3.4GHz 2Gb). I'm sure quite a few people will use fairly low spec machines to run this software so this might be a problem.
Sorry, not a fan of Microsoft's version of the ribbon UI, or “The Fluent UI” as they like to call it, and I note even Microsoft have never inflicted it on developers in Visual Studio. It was after all originally introduced into Office to help users who could not find things in the menus of their word processors. Developers tend not to have that kind of problem. Yes I did notice that you can switch it off, but I was not able to get that far. I would like to hope that the ability to switch off the ribbon UI will be maintained in future versions. Removing customisation options seems to be a bit of a fad with some developers at the moment, e.g.Unity in Ubuntu and Firefox slowly turning into Chrome. The problem seems to be with developers deciding that just because they like something, everyone else has to like it too. This is rarely true. High levels of UI customisability results in more happy users.
Something that must always have been a problem for anyone with any pre .Net versions of Visual Studio is the use of the .bas file extension. This has always belonged to Microsoft's (pre .Net) Visual Basic module files. Previous installers for the Picaxe software did not seem to override existing registry settings for this file extension, but I note that version 6 does (I had to set them back). As there is a lot of legacy VB5 and VB6 software about, probably quite a bit written by hobbyists who use Picaxes, I wonder how many other people have a problem with this. Although I mainly use C# with Visual Studio .Net for Windows applications these days, I've got quite a few VB6 applications that work perfectly so there is no point in wasting time rewriting them.
I will wait a bit and try version 6 when it has become more stable. Currently version 5 does everything I need. I'm generally hard to please and I'm sure lots of people will have different opinions, but this is my feedback for the moment and I hope you find it useful.
My Experience
It installed with no problem and I opened an existing 28X1 program I wrote a bit ago. When I tried to check the syntax, a dialogue popped up to say that the #picaxe directive did not match the environment setting that seemed to have defaulted to 20M2. I attempted to dismiss the dialogue but the OK button on it did nothing. Eventually I had to kill the program with the Task Manager. I restarted and tried to change the environment setting from 20M2 to 28X1 but after changing the setting in the left hand panel, the program locked up and I had to kill it with the Task Manager again. I restarted and tried again and the same thing happened (3 times). So given that I don't have any 20M2 projects, I'm stuck and have uninstalled the software.
Some Observations
Version 6 seems to be quite heavy weight compared with the 5.4.3 I am currently using. Version 5.4.3 loads from scratch in less than 2 seconds. Version 6 was taking over 15 seconds on the same machine (dual core 3.4GHz 2Gb). I'm sure quite a few people will use fairly low spec machines to run this software so this might be a problem.
Sorry, not a fan of Microsoft's version of the ribbon UI, or “The Fluent UI” as they like to call it, and I note even Microsoft have never inflicted it on developers in Visual Studio. It was after all originally introduced into Office to help users who could not find things in the menus of their word processors. Developers tend not to have that kind of problem. Yes I did notice that you can switch it off, but I was not able to get that far. I would like to hope that the ability to switch off the ribbon UI will be maintained in future versions. Removing customisation options seems to be a bit of a fad with some developers at the moment, e.g.Unity in Ubuntu and Firefox slowly turning into Chrome. The problem seems to be with developers deciding that just because they like something, everyone else has to like it too. This is rarely true. High levels of UI customisability results in more happy users.
Something that must always have been a problem for anyone with any pre .Net versions of Visual Studio is the use of the .bas file extension. This has always belonged to Microsoft's (pre .Net) Visual Basic module files. Previous installers for the Picaxe software did not seem to override existing registry settings for this file extension, but I note that version 6 does (I had to set them back). As there is a lot of legacy VB5 and VB6 software about, probably quite a bit written by hobbyists who use Picaxes, I wonder how many other people have a problem with this. Although I mainly use C# with Visual Studio .Net for Windows applications these days, I've got quite a few VB6 applications that work perfectly so there is no point in wasting time rewriting them.
I will wait a bit and try version 6 when it has become more stable. Currently version 5 does everything I need. I'm generally hard to please and I'm sure lots of people will have different opinions, but this is my feedback for the moment and I hope you find it useful.
