ColdFusion Beyond

I imagine most of you have heard of Adobe's launch last year of the new "Creative Cloud" (CC) versions of the programs within its Creative Suite (CS) line. When it first came out, I wasn't particularly concerned. I figured it was aimed at specific markets, like big business that might want to have the latest/greatest at all times and could afford the subscription fees. There were rumors at the time that Adobe would go all CC, rumors I tended to write it off as paranoia. Adobe itself made it sound like CC was totally optional and if it wasn't for you, you could continue on with the desktop versions like always.

Suffice to say Adobe lied and I now those owe those folks an apology, so I'm sorry. Yes, Adobe announced at Adobe Max 2013 that it is effectively killing off the CS desktop product line. New versions will only be available from Creative Cloud. If you go to the Adobe CS6 site now now, you see a lovely notice that it's the last of the traditional software versions for any of the creative suite products and encouraging you to "upgrade" to CC, which will essentially be where what would have been CS7 will be released in June (with new, really crappy, barely readable icons, IMHO)

So what is the Creative Cloud thing and what does it really mean? There are lots of myths going around, like that it only runs through your browser, but they are myths.  Despite having "Cloud" in the name, the CC applications are all desktop-run applications. You download and install them the same as you would any of the existing CS 6 stuff. They don't run over the Internet or through your browser or any other such thing (thank goodness). In this regard, they really are no different from the existing CS products.

The big change that is causing lots of uproar (and even a fairly pointless petition) is that you are no longer buying a perpetual license for the applications you are using, instead you are on a month-to-month lease; i.e. it is all subscription-based. While your computer does not have to be online 24/7 for the apps to run, the computer will start prompting you after 30 days of not being able to get online and kill the software after 90 if it can't check the license periodically. On the good side, you can now use your "license" for two computers regardless of OS, versus the old license which only allowed for two computers with the same OS. You also get all upgrades/updates/etc as desired, without extra cost and can easily sync settings and even share files across multiple systems. Having CC is essentially like having the Master Collection of CS6 with some perks, like the option to have files on the cloud that can be accessed from all your comps, and access to a few non-CS apps, like Muse and their iPhone app Kuler, and features like the Behance collaborative social network.

Still, the subscription-based methodology isn't cheap. For an individual subscription, it runs $49.99/mth or $599.88/year to have access to all applications on Creative Cloud. If you already have any CS3 or above product, it drops to $29.99 for the first year ($359.88) or you can choose to subscription to individual apps for $19.99/mth/app ($239.88/yr/app). If you qualify for an educational discount, that $49.99/mth also drops to $19.99/mth.

Now, I use currently three applications from the CS suite with any regularity: Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and PhotoShop. I qualify for the educational discount through my job, so I'd be paying $239.88/yr on CC. The normal retail price for the Master Collection with educational discount is $999.99 (I've always said, Adobe does do some darn generous educational discounts). It would take just over 4 years of using CC before I start paying above what I'd have paid retail.  Without the educational discount, the Master Collection retails at $2599.99, so again just over 4 years before the CC subscription goes beyond the outright price. 

For students who only really need it for 1-2 years or even just a semester for classes, it is an awesome deal, much like text book rental versus buying.  If you are someone who has to upgrade every year, it really isn't a bad deal.  Presuming Adobe keeps up with their hype, you'll be on the next versions of all your apps (if you want) before you've "fully" paid for the current one you're on.

For business and organizations who do not qualify for educational discounts, the team pricing of $69.99/mth/person is still fairly good, as it is still 3 years before you meet the outright purchasing cost, per person. There is an educational team discount (though it is buried in the site and not easily findable on the main price chart), which bring it's down to $39.99/mth.  So $479.88/person/year - so only 2 years.  Many such insitutions, being non-profit with limited budgets, are more inclined to wait 3-4 years to upgrade, so that significantly more expensive. True, they can just do individual licenses for way less, but they it forces them to forgo the "team membership" benefits like extra storage, centralized deployment, easier seat reassignment, and 2 one-on-one consultations per person per year.

And if you only needed a few of the applications, you likely wouldn't buy the Master Collection to begin with. It would be like buying a Hummer to transport you and a mouse. More likely you'd get Design Premium, Web Premium, or Design & Web Premium, all of which are much less expensive.  So that 4 years of "cost recover" drops to around 2-3 years, depending on which one you would have usually purchased. And none of that takes into account the discounts you'd get upgrading from an older version to a new, versus buying full retail, when you upgrade.

For me, access to their high end video stuff without buying Master Collection would be a nice perk as I've always wanted to dabble in it.  But if I was buying my software stuff myself versus it being employer supplied, I sure wouldn't be upgrading every 3-4 years and I wouldn't be using FIreworks or Photoshop, I'd have just gotten Dreamweaver.  And I'd run it into the ground until it just can't run on my system anymore or no longer meets my needs, like I do most anything else. I use Quicken 2007 because it works - no reason to pay $50-100 for the newest version when the current works just fine. No, I can't download bank stuff anymore, but I couldn't in older versions either and I pay more attention when I have to reconcile myself.  I run Office 2003 because it works perfectly for my needs as is (plus I abhor that ribbon crap with a passion that was shoved into Office 2007 and up).

For folks, like my photography loving sweetie, who primarily just needs PhotoShop for photo editing and only upgrades very 5-10 years, CC is insanely expensive versus buying the retail version: $1,199.40-$2,398.80 over the course of those 5-10 years versus $699.99 for full retail or $199 for upgrading from an older CS edition. It cost less to upgrade previous CS editions than he'd have to pay for a single year on CC! And, for the most part, the software is good to go out of the box unless, again, you do an OS upgrade that can't run it, or for PhotoShop, when it can't handle the RAWs if you upgrade to a new camera.

There is also no guarantee the monthly prices won't start going up once they stop shipping CS6; their license only guarantees your price is fixed for the term of each annual commitment.  Considering Adobe already did a switcheroo regarding CC, I'm not particularly inclined to trust them saying that ever version of every app that goes on CC will always be available/usable.  Nor do I trust their saying you'll never be forced to upgrade.

If an updated version no longer meets your needs or works for your system, you could find yourself out in the cold.  Adobe could decide to ax a product all together and you'll be stuck trying to make your new versions backwards compatible with whatever older traditional desktop version you can find. And if Adobe goes belly up one day, you're stuck with hundreds, maybe thousands, of proprietary formatted files for apps like PhotoShop that will be rendered completely useless because that cloud-based subscription app will commit suicide 90 days after the server goes offline. In short, they offer consumers no exit strategy at all.  If you don't want to subscribe anymore, then all those proprietary files are useless! Yes, the PSD format is publically documented, but what about the rest? And what programs can really read and write them reliably besides PhotoShop?

The only bit of really good news, for me, is that not all of their products are going to the Creative Cloud model, like Lightroom.  At least, not for now.  For Adobe, the "foreseeable future" could just mean until the end of the year and they change their mind to go 100% subscription-based on that as well. As for me, I'll be sticking with CS 5.5 until I'm forced to upgrade my systems to a new OS or the like and it all just dies, and I'll be making a dozen back up copies of the installation download until then, just in case.  And when that day comes, that will be it for me with Adobe and the CS line.  Likewise, if my Dreamwaever CS 5.5 becomes too outdated to use, I guess I'll be trying out some of those IDEs mentioned in a previous post. Until then, I'm certainly no longer inclined to recommend anything from the Creative Suite/CC line, even though Adobe has long been the "boss" for image and video editing for as long as I can remember. 

To me, Adobe seems to be sending a clear message that they no longer want "lay", casual, hobbyist, or new users, only big, high budget organizations/companies or folks with money to burn that can afford a subscription-based plan (or who don't do the full math and just look at the "low" monthly fee).  They realize they are the best of the best and want to milk users for all they have got, confident in the lack of alternatives for many of their products.  Sadly, they are right, though maybe the advent of the Creative Cloud will be enough to get some new names out there trying to pick up those left behind.

As for Lightroom, I'm currently running version 3. Regardless of Adobe's new moves, I still love it, just like I still love Dreamweaver.  Fortunately, for me I don't have to have "shiny and new" all the time...my software and things don't stop serving my needs just because a new version came out.  And Lightroom 3 works great for me as is.  I'm not adverse to upgrading to 5 when it comes out, so long as it isn't butched to CC, for the improvements to the editing tools and being able to make videos from stills (versus having to dump them over to move maker), but I can also just live with 3 until I just can't run it anymore. Unlike Dreamweaver, the only threat to it getting out dated is if I get a shiny new camera that has a RAW format not supported by the software (which is unlikely - my camera also works just fine).  And it will be the one Adobe product I'll still recommend it, 'cause it rocks, but those recommendations will come with a caveat about Adobe's new business model.

That's my three pages or so of rambling about CC…how about you?  Do you love it, hate it, or somewhere in the middle?

I love Google Reader, especially combined with iGoogle, as it allowed me to easily track new posts on the various blogs of interest to me in a nice compact format that remembers what I've read or not read. If the title is interesting, I can click it to open in a new window and all good. And the "mark all as read" feature is nice as well. And all accessible from any computer where I was logged into my Google account. Alas, as most of you probably know by now, Google is killing off Reader due to "not enough users" at the end of June. iGoogle is also dying, but not till the end of November (even though it's demise was announced last year...Google's scheduling is odd...).

My Google Reader in iGoogle - nice, simple, clean

This left me trying to find a replacement. Most of what is out there in terms of RSS feed readers are just not how I want to see stuff. Magazine layout? No thank you! Categories, clouds, tags, what have you...no, a single, simple list is fine, thanks. Desktop based? No, I need to be able to access/read from multiple computers, multiple browsers on those computers, and if I can do it from my iPad cool (though I rarely do that one, so if not, I don't care). I saw various names floating around in all the news reports about Reader's shut for down for viable options, but none appealed to me.

I've also seen some folks loudly proclaiming those who use RSS are just "old fashioned" and they wouldn't miss it at all cause they have Twitter or whatever to find stuff. For my more polite response to that view, many of the blogs I read are smaller ones, not big mainstream company things, so they don't do Twitter posts for every update, and frankly I HATE Twitter. I won't use it, I won't even read it most of the time. So no, that isn't an option. And I'm not trying to "find" stuff, RSS feed consumption is generally for tracking what's already been located. Sites I found interesting that have regular (or irregular) content updates that I want to know about.

Anyway, in disgust I'd pretty much decided I was just going to build my own, then I don't have to deal with shut downs anymore. But time is starting to run short and my "to do" list in terms of personal projects is as long as it was back in January. After reading a bit more about it, I finally decided that, for now at least, I'll switch to Feedly. I'd rejected it at first because of their pushing the whole magazine format, but I have since learned I can pretty much get a layout similar to Google Reader via iGoogle if I desire.

I went to the site and hit the "Get Feedly for Chrome" which popped in a quick plug in. No problem there. When it was done, it took me to a page with a button to connect to Google Reader, so I hit that. Moments later, wee, I have my Feedly account and some feeds. At first I was really confused, since it seemed like it had only picked up 3 of the 42 feeds I follow, but after more hunting around I found the full list of feeds it had pulled in, which was correct. So yay. It does offer categorization, but I'm just leaving all my uncategorized since I don't care about that right now.

After playing with the settings and turning off most of the "enhanced" features and switching up the themes a bit, it's usable and will certainly suffice for my needs. It does have some odd quirks, though. For example, on the All/Index pages, you can switch up the views between "Title Only", "Magazine", "Card", and "Full Article". For most of the views, the content loads in the main part of the site design, which seems to be fixed width. However, when I go to Title View, i.e. the one like Google Reader that I am going to use, it switches to a percentage-based design and the main content window stretches to full the browser window. For context, I have Chrome on my second monitor on the computer I'm on now, which is at a1920x1080 resolution and I have my browser maximized. I can live with it, though the sudden shift is a little visually disconcerting when literally every other aspect of the site is fixed at the same width, but it just seems like an odd thing to do for a list of text titles, but not for the image glutted magazine view, for example.

Also, if you resize the browser window down "too much", the whole left side menu vanished behind a little button, then pops up on mouse over as an overlay on top of the content. I hate that kind of thing, but I'm guessing they are using a "responsive design" to work with mobile devices (though really, resized down to 1076x736 is considered too small?). Again, it's tolerable since I always have my window maximized anyway.

One aspect that made me laugh out loud was the one setting asks if you want a "Giant Mark As Read" button to show at the bottom of the feed. I was like, "sure", figuring it would be a button or something. But man, when they say Giant, they meant it! Gave me a laugh and hey, can't say I can't see it :-)

"Mark as Read" button - browser window is cropped a little, but suffice to say, that is GIANT! Otherwise, close enough to what I'm used to.

I do have concerns, of course. Feedly is itself just a wrapper for Google Reader via the API. They are working on their own server-based implementation that will supposedly result in a "seamless" transition when Google Reader shuts down. If they are delayed, something borks, whatever, then I'm guessing it will just go away. The company that built it sounds confident though, and of the options I've seen it's the closest to what I want, so for now I'll take the risk. There is also the bigger risk that now that Reader is dead, and many users are switching over to Feedly, they will decide to go from free to $$.  In deed, after I wrote most of this post, they added a survey about how much they should charge for it. *sigh* 

Suffice to say, I've made a back up of my feed list from Google, just in case, though.  I mean, I can live with losing my "what's been read" data, but I would hate to lose the list of feeds. And, until it is dead, I'll probably just keep using my iGoogle + Reader for my primary checking of my feeds.

P.S. When you click the "Get Feedly for Chrome" button, you get the Chrome App.  There is also a Feedly Extension, if you prefer it (like me). Just search for Feedly and look for the Extension that is from Feedly itself.

I am, it would appear, something of an oddity amongst "serious" ColdFusion developers, and maybe developers in general. Why? Well, besides the whole female thing, my IDE of choice is Dreamweaver, specifically CS5.5 as of today. Yes, that Dreamweaver. I started using it around 2002-2003 with Studio MX. At the time, I still also heavily used the ColdFusion Studio and later HomeSite+ IDEs (remember those?). Loved my HomeSite, but Adobe killed it off when they bought out Macromedia, so eventually Dreamweaver became my only IDE. Just realized that wow, I've used it for TEN years. @_@ And yes, I realize that there are still some folks using HomeSite+ out there, but it isn't supported and hasn't been updated in a long time.

Anyway, suffice to say, I like Dreamweaver and on the whole it has met my development needs for all that time. It has the things that matter to me: code coloring, customizable keyboard shortcuts, code complete/hints, easy to use and generally decent CSS/visual element (i.e. why I like design view), code snippets, customizable layout/interface, built-in FTP capabilities, file search with RegEx support, and even some low level debugging built in. It works well with HTML, CSS, ColdFusion, and even PHP when I want to delve into that. Even with XML files, it does a half-way nice job of figuring out custom auto completes for stuff based on what's already in the file. The addition in CS 5 of (finally) being able to have multiple server configurations to point to that are actually easy to switch between rocks. And yes, I like being able to rename a file and it auto update all links for me (though that's less useful now that I build most apps with a Framework).

Now before you click away going "oh, she's just a DW fan girl", this post isn't to wax poetic about the awesomeness of Dreamweaver. I do have my issues with it, of course. Keyboard shortcuts are awesome, but the system is too stupid to let me have one key be the appropriate comment shortcut based on file - so I can have CTRL+1 assigned to do comments for ColdFusion while in a CFM file, but it can't flip to comments for HTML while in HTML, XML for XML, etc. The SQL coloring sucks without a third-party modification and even then its kind of eh. The CSS editor works pretty well, but it lacks support for some fairly common properties at this point, like min-height, max-height, and all those nifty properties you'd use to put curves on a box. It crashes went almost predictable regularity if you turn on the file caching on a site with a lot of files (so then you have to disable it and lose that benefit). Of course, it has no 64-bit version, and don't get my started on the absolutely asinine crap it pulls when you upgrade - i.e. never keeping your preferences, keyboard shortcuts or anything beyond your site definitions (if you're lucky).

So then what is the point of my rambling? Well, I was looking at whether it was worth upgrading to CS 6 right now, since we're still on CF9 and likely won't go to 10 anytime soon. It is a rather pricey package, even with the educational discount, to upgrade just for some of the nice goodies it adds. I mean the fluid grid layouts and support for jQuery Mobile & PhoneGap, and CCS3. But we aren't building mobile apps right now and I'm not really feeling like we will be doing many in the future, though I'd certainly like to do them for personal stuff (more on that in another post). The FTP functions have been significantly improved, from reports I've read, which is a long overdue fix. But none of that addresses any actual issue I've had with the my current version. Supposedly it has better CCS3 support and an improved panel, which would be nice. But again, when budgets are tight, not worth the cost.

Of course, it is also good for any developer to occasionally revaluation their tools, see if anything is better out there, and so on. So, my partner uses Adobe's ColdFusion Builder for all his developing. So I figured why not take this chance to see if maybe it would be a good tool to use. From some informal surveys I've seen floating around on some top ColdFusion blogs, it seems to be what roughly half all ColdFusion developers are using, so can't suck completely, right? Wanting to be sure I gave it a fair shake, I found a helpful article from Adobe on transitioning to ColdFusion Builder for Dreamweaver users. Nice. So installed the trial and away we go!

Well, kinda sorta. Things got so hectic at work right after I got it installed back on January 26th (when I started this entry), I didn't have time to run it once. Ah well, nearly three months later, my brain could use a bit of a coding break, so killing an afternoon finally trying out ColdFusion Builder. Oddly enough, even though it is supposed to be a 60 day trial, when I opened Builder, it said I had only 12 days remaining. Probably opened it last month or something and then forgot about it. Anyway, on to getting set up.

Now I don't know about y'all, but when I first start using a new program, the first thing I do is hit the preferences and mess with anything that seems intuitive enough to figure out what it will do. Thanks to the aforementioned article, I already knew I could change the color coding to match Dreamweaver's, so I did that. Hey, you get used to certain color schemes, ya know? I was glad I had that article, though, because I'd I wouldn't have guessed that the Profile section under the ColdFusion preferences was what controlled the color scheme. Builder has an impressive range of preferences, but most of them might as well be named in Russian for figuring out what they are for without popping up the help - though help isn't always very useful. For example, under HTML, there is an option to "Switch to Aptana perspective when necessary" - well WTF is "Aptana perspective"? The Help box just says "This dialog allows you to set your workbench preferences." and doesn't detail any of the options at all. Ugh.

I finally gave up on the preferences and hit closed...which triggered an error about "Changing update stream". I'd seen a section for configuring updates, but I didn't even click to it...and it threw an error?

At least it didn't crash the program, so moving on. So many tabs...guess I'll tinker with the display a bit. In Dreamweaver, I use a customized version of App Developer Plus view, with a lot of the crap I don't use out of the way. It is usually maximized on my second monitor (1920x1080 resolution), but I shrunk it down to make the screenie saner.

With Builder, the default Perspective has a lot of stuff all over the place.

For how I work and how I like my work space, I dumped all of the stuff from the bottom middle, and the RDS stuff (we don't use it), the File browser, and move around stuff. I decided to keep Outline, for now, since it seemed useful. By the time I was done:

Much cleaner. Now to set up a project, which seems to be Builder's equivalent to Dreamweaver's "Sites". The selector for "New Project" has three options...though two have nothing to tell me the difference between them.

Considering what I develop, I picked ColdFusion Project to keep things moving. With that done, I decided to just do a few of the things I might normally do in a given day: open a file, do some coding, save said file, upload to our development server and test it out. So I popped open a little HTML file made for helping me test formats and style changes. I was pleasantly surprised to see a tool bar appear on the file with some common clickers that I like from Dreamweaver, like list format and the like. Some didn't quite work like I expected. For example, on the CSS tab, I hit the color bar expecting I could pick a color and it would put it in inside a style attribute of the tag I was on, or prompt to make a class or the like. Instead it just stuck the hex code where my cursor was. Still, at least it does have a color picker.

So I manually typed in a style attribute to try out the code assist. Very disappointed that it was not even putting in the colons after picking a property from the drop down. I do, however, love that the contextual drops customize to what you are working on, for example if you use the color #0000a0 in one spot, it will offer it as a quick selection on any other color properties. A nice touch!

Once I was done throwing in some random silliness, I was ready to upload. Okay...where is the upload button, short cut, link, something? *** rummages around the interface...tries right clicking on the file... *** I see a "Synchronization" sub menu, which is probably it, but the options are all greyed out. Okay, I know damn well it can do it as my partner has done it before and I'm pretty sure it was from a right click on the file, and probably that menu so why won't it give me options? *** rummages more ***

Five minutes later I gave up and Googled. Thank you Ben Forta and Adobe! So the only way to set up an FTP connection is from the file window...the one I closed earlier? *sigh* Fine...adds it back while grumbling about the stupidity of having only one way to get there and wondering WTF the whole server thing I did while making the project was for...with that done, my synchronization menu was all happy and I was able to upload my humble little file. Checked the dev site and yep, it was there. Yay!

Now, can I set a keyboard short cut for uploading, like I have on Dreamweaver? Or for that matter, can I customize any of the keyboard short cuts, because I am used to certain key combos doing certain things...why yes, I can! And it was relatively easy to find in the preferences, once I filter by "short".

Now let's try opening a "real" file, one of our CFCs. Yeah, I'm liking that outline view for quick navigation to functions, or even to specific tags within the functions. A filter open is just extra gravy.

The color coding isn't a 100% match for Dreamweaver, but close enough. The font is a bit tiny, though, so let's see if I can customize that too. Again, it is the preference filters to the rescue. Suffice to say, for stuff where it is named in something resembling what I think it will be called, that filter helps a lot! And unlike many of the other screens, this one actually has nice on-screen descriptors so you know what each color and font actually applies to! So I was able to switch the default (shown below) to my preferred coding font, MS Reference Sans Serif, size 10.

Added in a bit of code missing from one function that was on my to do list. Copy/paste worked fine of course. Went in an tweaked the query, since we're updating in this instance instead of inserting. Code assist failed while adding a cfsqltype to a queryparam...well pooh. I was curious to see if it was convoluted as Dreamweaver's, which makes you type it most of the way to pick, since it doesn't skip the cf_sql that is part of ALL of them. Ah well.

There are a lot more things I could explore, I know, but I already know I'm not going to stick with Builder. Maybe if I did no UI stuff at all, I could get past the annoyances I've already noted, after all Dreamweaver has plenty of its own. But I do UI stuff on top of my ColdFusion development. While the outline view is nice, as is the unexplored function of being able to set keyboard short cuts to auto insert a snippet, in the few hours I've messed around with it, I haven't seen any compelling functionality that would make it worth switching and learning a new IDE.

I'm sure some folks are gonna say I didn't give it a fair shake by not trying it for more than a few hours, but for me that's more than enough. If there was any chance I might switch, I'd give it a longer trial, but just as you can pick up and book and go "nope" after reading the back cover and the first page, so too did I realize this just wasn't for me. My partner said I'd hate it, but that is too strong a word. I don't hate it; my first impression is that it is a nice little IDE. If I were where I was years ago, losing HomeSite+, I'd probably have switched to this if it was around back then. If I was talking to someone in the market for an IDE, I'd recommend giving it a try.

P.S. If you, like me, have no clue what an Aptana is...it appears to be another IDE built on the Eclipse engine for HTML, CSS, JS, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. So just how many plug ins does ColdFusion Builder (also built on Eclipse) need to work with the variety of languages Dreamweaver handles out of the box?

Back in November, during National Novel Writing Month, I purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking to use for dictating my novels and other writing.  I got version 11 because Amazon.com had it for a great price. As a side note, I later picked up version 12 as a raffle prize for our TGIO party thanks to another sale. 

Anyway I have been pretty happy with it.  With its initial training, it works pretty well despite my Southern accent and tendency to talk to fast.  It works well enough that since I got it going on my desktop, I've used it to dictate at least 30-40% of my NaNo novel, all of my personal blog posts (including several lengthy ones with financial stuff and uncommon words), I dictated the last three posts on my Animania blog (yes, even with Japanese names!), and I used it for the "Is ColdFusion Dead?" post here back in November.

The desktop version offers a rich feature set, including various training dialogs you can read through to help it learn your speech patterns (seriously, go through the Dilbert one and try to keep a straight face!), the ability to scan your documents and emails to learn your typical writing patterns, and the ability to learn from the corrections you teach it. 

It isn't 100% perfect, of course, but correcting its mistakes is generally an easy process and it gets better as you become more comfortable using it and as you teach it.  Accuracy is also significantly enhanced by having a good quality headset, which is conveniently included with the software.  The included headset works great for dictation and is decently comfortable. It does tend to hurt my ears after an hour or so of straight use, but so does the phone so I don't hold that against it.

The only real issue I've had with the program is a tendency to get sluggish after an hour or so, however I also recognize this isn't entirely the program's fault.  I'm running Windows 7 64 bit with only 4 gigs of RAM - as you might expect, a speech recognition program can eat up some RAM.  When I upgrade to 8 gigs, I suspect the sluggishness issue will also but disappear.

One complaint often leveled about Dragon though is the cost.  The home edition is priced at $100, though Amazon often has it for around $50.00 and you can usually pick up the second most recent version for around $30.00.  Still that might be more than some people want a pay, especially when Windows 7 has a built-in free speech recognition program (it originally was included with Vista, but we like to forget Vista exists).

I'd seen a few folks comment about Windows built-in, home grown one and compliment it. A few even said it was better than Dragon.  So I decided to put it to the test on my work laptop. I doubt I'd ever get to the point of using it for coding, of course, but I could see it being useful for documentation purposes, so why not.  For the trial run, I used my Microphone headset, which I use for Lync calls.

Per the Speech Recognition area, I went through the tutorial.  I was already suspecting things were over hyped when the tutorial, which already knows exactly what you are supposed to say, kept asking "what was that" to my saying "Okay" or speaking specific sentences like it asked.  Still, I know my accent is a little wonky for computers for some reason, so I continued on.  The command set seemed impressive and the tutorial makes it seem fairly easy to use.  There were differences between it and Dragon, of course, but they weren't so drastic I couldn't adapt quickly.

When that was done, I went through a round of training. Like with Dragon, you read text from the screen in a "natural" voice so it can learn how you talk with known input.  However, even during the training, it frequently sat there while I said the displayed phrase or sentence two or three times before it finally understood me.

Once I was done there, I decided to put it to a real test - actual writing!  I started this post using the speech recognition.  However, I soon realized the system was way clunkier than Dragon.  In both programs, for example, you can correct something by saying "Select" followed by what you need to correct. In Dragon, it will immediately display a list of possible alternatives, based on how you said it at the time and the surrounding content.  90% of the time the correct words are already there, I just tell it which to choose and continue on.  This is particularly true when dealing with homonyms or just needing to fix casing. You can just say "Caps that" or "bold that" to do formatting.  And you can just speak a new bit of dictation to replace the selected text all together.

With Windows Speech Recognition, you have to speak to replace - no helpful "hey did you want this one" menu.  You can apply formatting right then, but if you want to fix bad mixed casing or if it just got the wrong "too", you have the say it all over again.  Then it will offer you a list of options to pick from.  If what you want isn't on the menu, you can spell it out (like with Dragon) or say it again to get another menu of options.  Once you get the list, you say the number of the one you want, but Windows adds an extra step here as well - with dragon once you say "Choose X" it does it and moves on.  With Windows, you have to say "OK" after it highlights the selected number.

I found Windows spelling dialog to be clunkier as well. It could not get any capitalizations right unless I always put them in the form of "Capital A as in Apple" or "Capital D as in Dog".  Capital A alone just didn't work.  This could, again, be it having issues with my accent, but considering Dragon gets it right the vast majority of the time, I'm thinking it's a weakness in the program.

The big deal breaker for me, though, that caused me to give up writing this entry in it after around the second paragraph, was how much it kept missing my saying even clear, basic works (like the whole missing OK during the tutorial).  And correcting some errors, like its writing Amazon.com as "amazon .Com" eventually had me turning to the keyboard. I could fix the casing, but getting rid of the space was apparently impossible. Other times when it added extra spaces, I could not select the space and delete it like I can with Dragon.

I'm sure Microsoft will continue to improve on the Speech Recognition system and hopefully for the better.  For now, though, I'd have to say the Windows 7 one is a pass for me.  With just trying to write fairly normal text, it was too clunky, too cumbersome, and too inaccurate.  I certainly can't imagine trying to use it for technical terms, character names, foreign words, or the like.

Recently we had a scare at work, and were told that we will lose our jobs very soon.  Fortunately it was a false alarm but still we lived 24 hours without fear.  The same week I had a younger person I knew ask me what I thought about web development and if I would suggest going to ColdFusion.  These two incidents caused me to rethink the oft asked question of "if ColdFusion is dead" and how it applies to me personally.  I have to say for me the answer may end up being yes.

In my area ColdFusion is not very well used, in fact, it's rarely used.  Not many places other than our own unit within our state agency that uses it.  There may be a few departments on the college campus that use it and I think one local development shop, maybe two.  That's about it.  Now elsewhere in the country, ColdFusion is quite alive and well.  There are quite a few places that use it, but here when I had the fear that I was going to lose my job, I found that there is no ColdFusion work available at all.

So what I answered my younger friend, I found myself having to answer in a more ambiguous fashion than I normally would have.  Namely I told him that it would depend on what you want to do with your life in general.  So if you wanted to stay here in my area, Bryan-College Station, I would say no, do not get into ColdFusion, instead, learn another language like PHP or .Net.  If however you are open to travel and you didn't mind relocating then I would say yes, consider giving ColdFusion a shot.  Particularly if you want live on the East Coast up near Washington DC, Maryland, etc. which is a heavy ColdFusion area, or even if you're interested in living in Austin or Houston, which have higher ColdFusion bases.

There are still quite a few companies using ColdFusion, including some very big companies, so it's not as if there aren't jobs out there.  But if you're like me and you are not willing to leave where you live because you happen to really love it here and you have a house and a wonderful sweetie and stuff.  Then you don't have whole lot of choices.

So for me I have a strong suspicion that ColdFusion will be dying, and not be my primary language anymore. I've already made plans to start learning PHP 5 next year, it being the least this tasteful of the other languages available and one that I have some passing familiarity with.  It also has high job marketability and my boss doesn't hate it.  I still love ColdFusion, it is still my favorite language, and if I had my choice I keep doing it much longer, but I don't have a choice.  And so I must be a good adult and do what is required to continue doing the main thing I love which is building web applications.

So is ColdFusion dead?  For me, maybe it is.  For other people, I hope not.  I also hope there comes a time when Adobe gets ColdFusion out there enough that it comes back to my area and it's something I can return to.  But for now my mortgage won't allow me to hold out hope, neither will my tummy or my car for my other life expenses.