Pulse makes Eclipse usable

For a long time I have been a fan of Eclipse, I certainly liked what the organization did and how it was an open platform that allowed developers to extend it. But Eclipse was a usability nightmare when it came to actually getting all the bits and pieces together that you'd want to use. Digging around for compatible versions of plugins and such made it so that I just never found Eclipse worth switching to from IntelliJ. My time was simply more important than trying to dig through logs and figure out why a plugin didn't work or some other such nonsense.

Enter Pulse, an environment for making it (gasp) easier to get all the bits you'd want for Eclipse development in an easy to use and intelligible manner. No more going through plugin hell!


http://www.poweredbypulse.com/catalog.php

I absolutely appreciate the mechanism these guys are providing for getting up and running quickly. Simply bring up the catalog, click on the thing you want to install and all the dependencies and such are dealt with. If something needs GEF, I don;t have to find it. I don't have to hunt for some retarded obscure version of it. It just works and I can get to making other software. Like this a lot.

Prior pain screwing around with Eclipse had prevented me from doing a lot of work with Android lately, but with Pulse I just clicked that I wanted to install the Android packages for Eclipse and then just waited while Pulse brought down everything I needed for that. Then when I wanted to add subversion, click wait - done.

Much appreciation to whomever created this stuff and I home that all plugin developers go through this clear user-centric method for getting a user development environment up and running.  

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